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ABSTRACT
Which ethnopolitical organizations run for office? An extensive literature studies when ethnic parties emerge. We explore an understudied dimension that distinguishes various ethnopolitical organizations: the support of international governmental organizations (IGOs). IGOs can encourage ethnopolitical organizations to participate in elections by lowering an organization’s campaign costs or the price of internal restructuring. IGOs can also increase the expected benefits of running for office. Ties with an IGO communicate to voters that an organization will effectively represent the ethnic group domestically and internationally. We explore the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the international community’s hand is highly visible, to illustrate the mechanisms that link IGO support and organizations’ participation in elections. We then use a large-N cross-national analysis, relying on original data of hundreds of ethnopolitical organizations from 1991–2006 throughout Eastern Europe, to assess the theory’s generalizability. We use a recursive bivariate probit model to incorporate an estimate of which organizations IGOs are most likely to support into our analysis. Our results show that IGO support strongly correlates with an ethnopolitical organization running for office. This research contributes to our understanding of how ethnopolitical organizations with differing ideologies, competitive dynamics, and international ties come to represent an ethnic minority.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 55–56.
2 Following Sartori, we define a political party as “any political group that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through elections, candidates for public office.” Parties and Party Systems, 56.
3 Rechel, The Long Way Back.
4 See Birnir, Ethnicity and Electoral Politics; Chandra, “Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability”; Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict.
5 Some scholarship examines whether organizations adopt violence or nonviolent protest without including the possibility of running for office within the suite of strategies studied. See Asal et al., “Gender Ideologies”; Breslawski and Cunningham, “International Influences”; Chenoweth, Pinckney, and Lewis, “NAVCO 3.0 Dataset”; Cunningham et al., “Words and Deeds”; Dahl et al., “Accounting for Numbers”; Pearlman, Palestinian National Movement; Salehyan, Feinberg, and Naughton, “Merging Actors.”
6 Koev, “Why Ethnic Parties?,” 230.
7 Cunningham, “Understanding Strategic Choice”; Cunningham, Dahl, and Frugé, “Strategies of Resistance.”
8 Cunningham, “Understanding Strategic Choice.”
9 Hultquist, Birnir, and Asal, “The Politics of Co-Optation.”
10 Curtis and de Zeeuw, “Rebel Movements and Political Party Development”; de Zeeuw, From Soldiers to Politicians; de Zeeuw, “Political Party Development in Post-War Societies”; Kumar, Postconflict Elections.
11 Söderberg Kovacs, “From Rebellion to Politics.”
12 Brubaker, “National Minorities, Nationalizing States”; Also see Jenne, Ethnic Bargaining.
13 Asal, Ayres, and Kubota, “Friends in High Places.”
14 Koev, “Ethnic Minority Party Formation.”
15 See Kelley, Ethnic Politics in Europe; Rechel, Minority Rights; Vachudova, Europe Undivided.
16 See Galbreath, Nation-Building and Minority Politics; Koev, “Ethnic Minority Party Formation”; Kelley, Ethnic Politics in Europe; Smith, “Framing the National Question.”
17 Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict; Rabushka and Shepsle, Politics in Plural Societies.
18 Bernauer, Regime Support and Conflict; Cohen, “Proportional versus Majoritarian”; Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies.
19 Chandra, “Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability.”
20 Birnir, Ethnicity and Electoral Politics; Ishiyama, “Ethnopolitical Parties and Democratic Consolidation”; for work on why ethnic representatives within nonethnic parties may be insufficient, see Jensenius, Social Justice through Inclusion.
21 De Winter, “A Comparative Analysis.”
22 Giuliano, “Who Determines the Self”; Bochsler and Szöcsik, “Building Inter-Ethnic Bridges.”
23 Bochsler, “When Two of the Same.”
24 Bernauer and Bochsler, “Success of Ethnic Minority Parties.”
25 De Winter, “A Comparative Analysis.”
26 Barnett and Finnemore, “Politics, Power, and Pathologies”; Pevehouse, Democracy from Above. Of course, not all IGOs have liberal agendas. This creates a significant scope condition on the theory’s generalizability. Specifically, we anticipate that IGOs comprised of largely democratic states will support ethnopolitical organizations’ democratic participation. We expect that global IGOs comprised of states with a diversity of democratic and non-democratic political institutions, such as the UN, or regional IGOs composed of primarily non-democratic states, such as the Arab League, are unlikely to play this role. Furthermore, regional IGOs mainly composed of democratic states are also unlikely to support ethnopolitical organizations in other regions. This limitation presents an opportunity for future research to theorize and test the relationship between different types of IGOs and the ethnopolitical organizations’ strategic choices.
27 We thank Reviewer 1 for their insights into the different mechanisms that tie IGO support to ethnic organizations’ electoral participation.
28 UNDP, “Working with Political Parties”; Kumar, “International Political Party Assistance.”
29 Manning, “Armed Opposition Groups.”
30 Brusis, “The European Union”; Staroňova and Malíková, “Policy Making,” 22.
31 Ram, “Democratization through European Integration,” 39–40.
32 Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion.
33 Manning, “Armed Opposition Groups,” 64.
34 This aligns with Söderberg Kovacs’s argument that recognition by international actors, including IGOs, enhances the likelihood that a rebel group will transform into a political party. “From Rebellion to Politics.”
35 Marra and Radice, “Semiparametric Recursive Bivariate Probit.”
36 Belloni, “Peacebuilding.”
37 Manning, “Elections and Political Change,” 63.
38 ICG, “Doing Democracy a Disservice,” 5.
39 Author conversation with Robert Barry, March 11, 2019.
40 Du Pont, “Levelling the Political Playing Field,” 304.
41 Du Pont, “Democratisation,” 14.
42 Hulsey, “Why Did They Vote.”
43 The OSCE considered a party to be “multiethnic” where the party upheld the right of refugees to return per the Dayton Accords and supported the joint institutions of the BiH. Thus the OSCE can support a “multiethnic” organization that is ethnically homogenously. OSCE, “Bosnia and Herzegovina, General Elections.”.
44 Du Pont, “Democratisation,” 9–10.
45 Šedo, “The Party System,” 94.
46 ICG, “Changing Course?,” 1.
47 Hulsey, “Why Did They Vote,” 1135.
48 ICG, “Is Dayton Failing?”
49 SAFAX, “Union of Social Democrats.”
50 Du Pont, “Levelling the Political Playing Field,” 305.
51 ICG, “Is Dayton Failing?”
52 OSCE, “Bosnia and Herzegovina, General Elections,” 7.
53 Du Pont, “Levelling the Political Playing Field.”
54 Ibid., 307.
55 Ibid., 308.
56 Knaus and Martin, “Travails of the European Raj.”
57 SAFAX, “Union of Social Democrats.”
58 Du Pont, “Democratisation,” 13.
59 ICG, “Doing Democracy a Disservice,” 7.
60 Ibid., 15.
61 ICG, “Wither Bosnia?,” 2.
62 Bojicic-Dzelilovic, “From Humanitarianism to Reconstruction,” 91.
63 We define Eastern Europe as Albania, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia.
64 Gurr, “Minorities at Risk.” To be included in the MAR dataset, ethnic groups must have at least 100,000 members or more than 1% of a national population and must be considered permanent residents by outside observers (i.e. not migrants or refugees).
65 In non-election years, an organization is coded as participating if the organization has members in office or has announced an electoral run.
66 We theorize that, without additional knowledge of the IGO(s) involved, the support of IGOs increases the overall likelihood that an ethnopolitical organization participates in elections. Future research should expand on this idea to analyse how different types of IGOs affect ethnopolitical organizations’ strategic decisions.
67 This logic conforms with research showing that militant separatist organizations are less likely to transition to political parties than other militant organizations. Söderberg Kovacs and Hatz, “Rebel-to-Party Transformations.”
68 The use of violence does not exclude participating in elections (Matanock and Dow, “Candidates and Combatants”) or other forms of regime co-option (Brandt, “Peace Agreements Counterinsurgency”).
69 de Zeeuw, “Understanding the Political Transformation.”
70 An organization continues to be considered militant until the organization renounces the use of violence.
71 Asal, Heger, and Stinnett, “Calculated Contributors.”
72 Hultquist, Birnir, and Asal, “The Politics of Co-Optation.”
73 Data is drawn from the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset. An armed conflict is a contested incompatibility over government or territory where armed force between a government of a state and another party results in at least 25 battle-related deaths in a calendar year. We limit our analysis to armed conflicts that since onset exceeded 1,000 battle-related deaths. Pettersson and Öberg, “Organized Violence, 1989–2019”; Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conflict 1946-2001.”
74 We run a variance inflation factor test to identify if we should be concerned about multicollinearity amongst our independent variables. To make Generalized Variance Inflation Factors (GVIFs) comparable across dimensions, we assess where DF is the number of coefficients in the subset. The highest value is 1.51, considerably below the standard threshold for concern. Fox and Monette, “Generalized Collinearity Diagnostics.”
75 Cunningham, Dahl, and Frugé, “Strategies of Resistance.”
76 Van Cott, From Movements to Parties.
77 Gurr, “Minorities at Risk.”; data carried forward.
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Caroline M. Brandt
Caroline Brandt is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020.
Victor Asal
Victor Asal is a Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is also the Director of the Center for Policy Research. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Maryland in 2003.