(iPoster) Ethnic Minority Parties and Resisting Backsliding in Regional Legislatures

• In Event: Poster Session: Democracy and Autocracy I

Abstract

Democratic backsliding can be understood as the removal of political alternatives and pluralism. Even where there is an entrenched central government that is engaged in removing obstacles to its power, its degree of control will differ between regions across a state’s territory. Backsliding is a process rolled out unevenly across a state, with regional legislatures either falling into line or challenging central authority. Ethnic minorities are populations that often have a default state of distance from central state power. Where ethnic minorities are organized into political parties – as in regional ethnic enclaves – challenges to central control are likely to be more sustained. As argued by Rovny (2023), democratic institutions are likely to be more resilient where there are politically-organized ethnic minorities, because the have an existential stake in maintaining pluralism.
That said, another option for ethnic minorities and their parties is to make deals with a strong central government instead (Kiss et al 2018, Szekely 2019). When might ethnic minority parties challenge a strong center, and when might they allow themselves to be coopted? These dynamics can provide a better understanding of how the expansion of central government control takes place outside the capital city. They illustrate how democratic backsliding unfolds at the meso level, and how we can think about differential pockets of central control and not-control across the territory of a state.
To understand these control dynamics, this paper examines the party politics of regional legislatures in Romania and Slovakia with substantial Hungarian minorities and Hungarian parties. I examine elections to legislatures in three counties in Romania (judeti) and four regions (kraj) in Slovakia – across three decades from the 1990s to the present. The results show that in addition to the challenger-versus-cooptation options outlined above, ethnic minorities use other strategies that are more nuanced. If the main Hungarian party is seen as co-opted, the group may fragment, with an emergence of independent candidates or new challenger parties. Or, “weird coalitions” might be formed between parties at the local level that contradict alliances at the center. The data for the piece comes from a book manuscript on local enclave politics, under contract with Cambridge University Press. In the editing process, the meso level data has been removed to create this separate piece on regional legislatures.

Author

• Sherrill Stroschein, University College London