The Affiliation of Regionalist and Ethnic Minority Parties with Party Groups in the European Parliament – a Fuzzy-Set Analysis

Although the European Parliament (EP) has no rules to guarantee or facilitate the political representation of minorities, regionalist and ethnic minority parties compete successfully in EP elections. Once they have won seats in the EP, however, their affiliation with European party groups (EPGs) varies greatly, and although the European Free Alliance (EFA) has been founded as a regionalist and pro-minority platform, it has not been able to unite the majority of such parties. In fact, only six of the 17 regionalist or ethnic minority parties gaining seats in the last two EP elections are affiliated with the EFA. The main reason for this is the lack of ideological coherence among parties representing regionalist or ethnic minority interests. First, there is already considerable variation on the core-periphery cleavage, i.e. whether or not parties advocate regional autonomy or even independence, or to what degree they favor minority rights in general. Second, regionalist and ethnic minority parties also vary widely along the general left-right as well as the cultural GAL-TAN cleavage. In addition, the salience of the two dimensions may vary: while some parties strongly focus on a regionalist or ethnic minority agenda and de-emphasize more general political positioning, others may present themselves as regional branches of more mainstream parties. Finally, parties representing national minorities may choose to affiliate with supportive parties from their kin-state. The paper uses data from the 2009 and 2014 EP elections and the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey to conduct a fuzzy-set analysis in order to both classify regionalist and ethnic minority parties and explain their EPG affiliation based on the abovementioned characteristics.