From the Ground up: Local Council Electoral Systems and Party Emergence

• In Event: Comparative Looks at Minority Representation

Abstract

This paper focuses on city party systems that lie in enclave cities – places where the ethnic minority is the local majority. Enclaves exhibit reversed power dynamics, such that a minority ethnic party that is a key player at the statewide level may be only a minor player at the local level. This is because challenger parties to the “main” group ethnic party may fragment the group vote – in enclaves, it is safe to vote for challengers without handing power to the other ethnic group (Stroschein 2011). Local political systems in enclave cities thus often display vast differences from statewide or even regional systems. In addition, voters will often have a personal knowledge of the candidates for whom they are (or are not) voting (Dawson 2012), which can result in more independent candidates or candidates from unexpected parties. There might even be some parties that are particular to one city, and yet they can dominate the local system.

This paper outlines how parties might emerge from local level elections a premise overlooked in much of the general parties literature. I examine city council elections in four cities in Slovakia that contain Hungarian majorities (enclaves) to illustrate these dynamics, going through these council elections from 1994 to the present. This paper examines how local electoral systems for city councils produce the local council party system, and how these councils compare across similar cities. This focus explains a longstanding puzzle with regard to parties in Slovakia. There, the ethnic Hungarian party MK, a relatively strong entity for years, lost ground to a bi-ethnic Hungarian-Slovak party, Most-Híd, starting in 2010. From the perspective of the ethnic party literature, Most-Híd is a strange hybrid as a bi-ethnic party. It has been generally regarded as an outlier in the study of ethnic parties. But its emergence makes more sense with a focus on local elections, which in Slovakia take place using a first-past-the-post (FPTP) single-member-district system In local elections in Slovakia, the system encourages vote-pooling, in the sense that candidates compete for elections in the same voting pool. If city council districts contain a mix of Slovaks and Hungarians, candidates will have an incentive to appeal to both voters. It is only in districts that are ethnically homogenous that a candidate would have an incentive to link a campaign to ethnicity. Most-Híd’s emergence has its origins in local city politics, rather than in statewide politics – although it has grown in stature and is now part of the central government.

I then contrast the Slovak FPTP system for local elections to local elections in Hungarian enclaves in Romania and Serbia – which use proportional representation (PR). There, the dynamics of PR tend to encourage city-specific parties that are not found at the state level. Nor do these parties easily fit with expected ethnic party dynamics, given the ethnic group fragmentation that is common in enclaves. The paper considers how these dynamics differ from some of the expectations in the comparative canon on parties (Almond 1960, Lipset and Rokkan 1967, Sartori 1976), as well as on party systems (Sartori 1976, Kitschelt 1992). A lack of study of these systems at the local level has produced a gulf between theoretical work on politics and work on the ground by party leaders and campaign strategists. For those conducting political campaigns, local politics are often a central focus for analysis and campaign targeting.

Author

• Sherrill Stroschein, University College London