Marginalized Economic Lives of Ethnic Minorities in Eastern Europe

• In Event: 3240 - The Economic Sociology of Inequality

Abstract

This paper explores how ethnic exclusion is implicated in creation of neoliberal capitalism in Eastern Europe. In contrast to the perspective on markets as a mechanism to improve the allocation of material resources between rational actors, over the inefficiencies of socialist redistribution, I call attention to a visceral economy of postsocialism, which focuses on people’s economic lives and sees markets as embedded in institutions and entangled in morals and emotions. I hypothesize that creation of neoliberal capitalism in the context of ethnic conflict and rise of nationalism manifests itself in significant economic marginalization of East European ethnic minorities. I use data from the Life in Transition Survey for sixteen countries on individuals’ economic attitudes in 2006, 2010 and 2016, including satisfaction with economy, preference for markets as a socio-economic system, and imagined economic future for children. I also examine assessment of economic lives in postsocialism compared to 1989, end of socialism. The results show that ethnic minorities were significantly less satisfied with the economic situation and their own household’s experience in 2006 than in 1989, and more discontent than the ethnic majorities, controlling for self-assessed social class standing and other relevant demographics. Moreover, even in economically prosperous times before the 2009 crisis, minorities were resigned that next generations are not going to fare better than they have, which continues to be the case after the 2015 refugee crises. Substantively, these grim findings have implications for understanding the incredibly high intolerance toward the “ethnically other,” including immigrants, in Eastern Europe and receptivity to nationalist political leaders. Theoretically, the paper underscores the importance for economic sociologists to examine race and ethnicity as central to our understanding of people’s economic lives.

Author

• Nina Bandelj, University of California, Irvine