Candidate Ethnic Identification in Post-Soviet Latvian Elections

• In Event: Minority Representation and Reaction

Abstract

Political parties explicitly identifying with a specific ethnic group is common in many ethnically diverse democracies. Social scientists have argued that this should not be surprising, as ethnic cleavages have long been thought to be important for the formation of political party systems. As political parties represent the various social groups within society, ethnic identities are natural bases for party differentiation, and political entrepreneurs have strong incentives to use ethnicity to mobilize voters and win elections. Yet comparative political scientists have studied “ethnicity” in the abstract far more often than specific “ethnicities.” The assumption has been that ethnic identities are all more or less the same, in that personal identification will inform individual voting behavior and thus be equally important for political entrepreneurs of all ethnic groups seeking to get voters to the polls. In fact, this approach ignores a crucial trade-off that parties and candidates must consider before explicitly identifying their candidacy with a specific ethnic group. While campaigning as the champion of a specific ethnic group may well make it easier to win support from coethnics, such an appeal is not likely to sway voters outside the ethnic group. This trade-off does not affect all groups equally: very large ethnic groups may sacrifice little by relinquishing the support of ethnic outsiders, while very small groups may ultimately be relegating themselves to a position of political irrelevance by constricting their support to a small coethnic base. This creates a direct link between the electoral viability of an overt ethnic appeal to voters and the size of the ethnic community in the voting population.

This paper documents this effect through a case study of the Republic of Latvia. Following its independence from the Soviet Union, Latvia successfully consolidated democratic institutions while avoiding serious violence between the country’s ethnic Latvian and Russian communities. Yet unlike some other post-communist countries with substantial minority populations, Latvia established virtually no institutional protections, subnational autonomy, or guaranteed representation for ethnic and linguistic minorities. This paper exploits this institutional and legal environment to analyze variation in the ways in which ethnic issues are incorporated into democratic politics. Using a candidate-level analysis of Latvian elections during the period of democratic consolidation, I identify which candidates employ ethnic rhetoric during electoral campaigns and which do not, and examine the relative success and failure rate of such appeals. In doing so, I chart how ethnic political issues are either adopted or abandoned in the political party system. The findings suggest that ethnic majority Latvian candidates and ethnic minority Russian candidates use explicit ethnic identification differently. While the over-time trajectory for ethnic Latvian candidates is to increase their use of ethnic rhetoric in campaigning, ethnic Russian candidates abandon their ethnic appeals to focus on liberal and social issues of human rights and economic equality. The results suggest that absent explicit institutional protections for ethnically-defined community, ethnic mobilization is a more viable electoral strategy for the ethnic majority Latvians than for the ethnic minority Russians.

While the empirical evidence is drawn from a single country, the findings have broader theoretical implications for other countries divided between majority and minority ethnic and racial groups. In Latvia, ethnic and linguistic identities are highly salient to day-to-day life, and ethnic divides are a source of social and political tension throughout the country. Nevertheless, demographic and institutional pressures have largely made talking about ethnic and linguistic issues during political campaigns a viable strategic option only for majority ethnic Latvians. The paper concludes by drawing comparisons to other countries divided between dominant majority ethnic groups and minority groups potentially vulnerable to discrimination and disenfranchisement. It suggests that “ethnic politics” may actually be largely the domain of majority group political entrepreneurs, who are insulated from the negative consequences of group mobilization by their large size, and who stand to benefit much more from appeals to coethnics than minority group candidates do.

Author

• Benjamin McClelland, Central European University