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Abstract
The aftermath of the first multi-party elections in 1990 in Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Herzegovina was the violent dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation. Elections for different levels of government deployed different electoral rules and formulas. A newly collected data-set on the 1990 elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina is used to test if and how incentives integral to two electoral models – proportional and majoritarian – influenced voting behaviour and shaped electoral outcomes at the level of municipalities. The effects of electoral rules are estimated within the framework of ethnic mobilization, which is seen as an opposing force that downplays the effect of electoral incentives. Results indicate that under different levels of ethnic mobilization, incentives will exert some influence under majoritarian rule, but this will be conditioned by the ethnic structure of the population and will decline under the run-off system, leading instead to radicalizing effects.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Analitika for the opportunity to be part of this project (for the second time), and for their support and mentorship. I would like to express my special gratitude to Nenad Stojanović and Daniel Bochsler for their support, comments and suggestions at different phases of the writing and also for a great opportunity to work toward its first version at the ZDA premises in Aarau during October 2013. I also thank Florian Bieber and anonymous reviewers for their critical comments on the last version of the article and Julianne Funk for her careful editing of the text. All errors are mine.
Notes
1. This term has been suggested as a way to circumscribe some of the conceptual issues surrounding the term ‘divided society’ which has been used en masse in the literature on ethnic relationships, ethnic conflict and electoral engineering. A ‘divided polity’ suggests that divisions which are fundamentally non-political persist primarily in the political space. Issues regarding the adequacy of the term have been debated for a long time. One attempt to overcome the issue of the accuracy of the conceptual apparatus is found in adding the adjective ‘deeply’. An alternative to ‘deeply divided societies’ would be ‘conflict-prone societies’. I thank Adis Merdžanović for drawing my attention to this issue.
2. One of the moments that strongly marked the historical memory of this process is the dissolution of the Yugoslav communist party at the 14th early Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in January 1990. A detailed overview has been given by Pauković (Citation2008).
3. Before the war which started in 1992, and for a year thereafter, Muslims were officially identified as Muslims. It was in 1993 that the Congress of Bosniak intellectuals publically announced the adoption of the new name Bošnjaci (Bosniaks), which was the name used during the medieval Bosnian Kingdom (it was also used by the Austro-Hungarians for all residents). Since 1995 and the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) the name Bosniak has been officially codified in the Constitution of BiH which was drafted as an integral part of DPA. Muslims will be used in this text.
4. False perceptions of the support among the voters led the incumbent party (the reformed Communists) in Croatia in 1990 to formulate electoral rules that would actually disfavour their own position. By choosing the SMD model over PR, based on the belief that they would lead the polls in the majority of electoral districts, the incumbent party effectively enabled the opposition (the Croatian Democratic Community HDZ) to win close to 58% of the seats in the entire Croatian parliament (356 seats in the tri-cameral parliament), and a two-thirds majority in the most important house, by winning slightly over 40% of the entire popular vote (Klemenčić Citation1991, 101–2).
5. Zuber (Citation2013) denotes these two elements as ethnic identification and ethnic behaviour, which revolves around identifiable ethnically-framed interests.
6. Oberschall (Citation2000, 988) reports the Yugoslav Survey results, noting that ‘[s]urvey research on ethnic relations in the mid-1980 found that in a national sample of 4232 Yugoslavs, only 7% believed that the country would break up into separate states, and 62% reported that the “Yugoslav affiliation was very or quite important for them”. On ethnonational relations, in workplaces, 36% characterized them as “good”, 28% as “satisfactory”, and only 6% said “bad” and “very bad”. For ethnonational relations in neighbourhoods, 57% answered “good”, 28% “satisfactory”, and only 12% chose “bad” and “very bad”’.
7. Oberschall (Citation2000, 983) writes: ‘After fear comes hate. The threatening others are demonized and dehumanized. The means of awakening and spreading such fears in Yugoslavia were through the news media, politics, education, popular culture, literature, history and the arts. The crisis frame in Yugoslavia was resurrected by Serb intellectuals over the plight of the Kosovo Serbs. Because of a higher Albanian birth-rate and higher Serb out-migration, Kosovo changed from 23% Serb in 1971 to 10% in 1989. Serb nationalists alleged that Albanians were threatening Serbs into leaving, and that the police and judiciary were not protecting Serbs against Albanian violence. Charges in the news media of sexual assault and rape by Albanians against Serbs were widely believed by Serbs’.
8. Anđelić Citation(Citation2003, 100–53) provides a very detailed overview of mobilization processes in BiH and Yugoslavia and describes the role and tactics of emerging nationalist organizations. To illustrate how nationalists saw each other as allies rather than adversaries he reports that the founding session of the SDS, the Serb ethnic party, was attended by the founders of the SDA, the Muslim ethnic party.
9. This was possible in only a few cases where another Serb party – SPO (the Serbian Renewal Movement) – won a small portion of votes. Due to very low frequency, we conflate SPO results into the ‘Other’ category.
10. This phrase is from Appadurai (Citation2006). Others have also argued that ‘small nations’ emerging in ethnically mixed environments tend to constitute their national communities in a particularly antagonistic fashion where the antagonistic objects are other small ethnic groups or, more often, competing nation-building groups that share or have competing claims over the territory they occupy. Not only does the share, but also the absolute size of a majority may come to influence the political dynamics and provide incentives and justify violence. See for example Jović (Citation2002).