Does an ethnic identity equal an ethnic vote?

Ethnic politics is often assumed to be different from mainstream party politics. The reason for this is that for ethnic issues descriptive representation is more important than substantial representation: as long as the ethnic identity is represented by a member of the same group, representation is supposed to be good. Another reason is that ethnic politics are about particular interests. Whereas a non-ethnic party can represent anybody’s interests, an ethnic party is assumed to pursue only the interests of the particular ethnic group. These two notions taken together create the assumption that underlies most research of ethnic politics: an ethnic vote equals an ethnic identity. Or, in other words, people with an ethnic identity will always prioritize a vote that favors their ethnicity, even over any other salient issue. As a result, studies about ethnic politics are generally about ethnic groups and ethnic parties rather than the ethnic individual. Chandra (2004) is one of the exceptions, however, she argues that ethnic voters are just as strategic as ‘regular’ voters, with the only difference that ethnic voters can use their ethnicity as a ‘short cut’ to the necessary information to cast the right strategic vote, with the aim to vote for a winning party. Although Chandra departs from the notion of an ethnic group being an entity, she still assumes that ethnicity will have supremacy over other issues, unless the opportunities to win are too little. This paper questions whether the assumption that an ethnic identity equals an ethnic vote is the right starting point to study ethnicity and politics. It therefore sets out to identify the vote choice of voters with an ethnic identity. The primary aim is to do so in an exploratory way, but with a secondary aim in mind to try to answer the question why ethnic voters cast a certain vote, by studying the possibly occurring variation. The research question of this paper is therefore: Under what circumstances do individuals belonging to an ethnic group choose to vote for a party of the majority rather than one representing their own ethnicity? To answer this question, the European Election Surveys 2009 (EES 2009) will be used. First, the European countries who host ethnic parties will be selected. Within these parties the respondents will be selected that answered negatively to the question whether they feel belonging to the main nationality of their country. These participants will be followed in their vote choice in order to establish whether ethnicity indeed means an ethnic vote or that variation exists. Second step will be, if variation occurs, to identify the factors that cause this variation, in order to be able to say something about the nature of the ethnic vote. The expectation of this paper is that variation can be found within the context of mainstream party competition. It therefore argues that ethnicity and politics can be studied within traditional research on parties.