Ethnic Parties as Democratic Actors: an Analytical Framework

Since most of the literature on ethnic parties to date has been driven by empirical realities, it has used a variety of terminologies to describe what we can call “ethnic” parties that are specific to a particular region. Authors write about “ethnic” parties in Africa, but about “ethnic minority” or just “minority” parties in Eastern Europe, “indigenous” parties in Latin America, and “ethno-regionalist” parties in Western Europe. These terms delineate slightly different patterns regarding the nature of the ethnic identity, but they all refer to parties that appeal to, and represent, a well defined group of individuals for whom ethnicity is the common denominator. These different terminologies have also created quite distinct sub-fields in the literature, each with its separate, yet similar, research agenda and internal debates. Single country studies and within-region comparisons thus dominate as methods of analysis. There are very few works that have analyzed parties from more than one region through a common analytical framework (Ishiyama and Breuning 1998; Birnir 2007). However, even they do not attempt to deal with the fundamental question underlying the study of ethnicity and party politics: Can we consider the ethnic party as a separate type of party? What is it that makes them different than non-ethnic parties and do all sub-types then fit with the general definition? This paper presents a theoretical argument that we can, in fact, treat parties representing communal identities – minority, indigenous, or ethno-regional -- as one type of party. It borrows insights from existing theories of ethnic party behavior (Horowitz 1985, Chandra 2005, Birnir 2007) and offers new ones to build expectations that will help us answer the following sub-questions. How do ethnic parties organize, mobilize support and compete in elections? Are they constrained by the limited and delineated nature of their support in these political arenas, and if so, how? Do we observe a pattern of ethnic party behavior that is different from the non-ethnic parties in the individual party systems? While mainly theoretically oriented and argumentative in nature, the paper uses examples from the experience of the minority parties in Bulgaria, Romania and Latvia, ethno-regionalist parties in Spain and indigenous parties in Bolivia and Ecuador to provide examples that validate the theoretical arguments.