Ethnopolitics from a Structuralist Perspective: Social Identities, Functional and Territorial Cleavages, and the Political Participation of Ethnic Minorities

The political participation of ethnic minorities is an important indicator of the quality of democratic representation. Public attention to ethnic minority issues tends to concentrate on party platforms, ethnic vote shares, and the coalition building and office seeking strategies of the ethnic parties as indicators of the presence of ethnic minorities in the political system. Most studies examine the role of constitutional provisions, electoral rules, and the performance of ethnopolitical or ethnoregionalist parties as minority representatives. However, analyses of the foundations of political conflict embedded in territorial and functional cleavages as a source of social identities minority interest formation are largely absent. The purpose of this paper is to establish a framework for examining the political participation of minorities through a multi-dimensional lens. It addresses the following questions: Is there a theoretically necessary path of minority interest formation? What explains variation in the level of minority demands for autonomy, self-governance, or secession reflected in support for ethnoregionalist parties? How significant are the politicizing effects of societal cleavages across Europe, especially in the context of European integration? These questions are directly researchable if situated within a framework which binds together the territorial, functional, and political bases of conflict in the European state system. The paper presents an argument about the causal significance of the relationship between structure (territorial order, regional distinctiveness, functional cleavages) and agency (political mobilization and empowerment) for the articulation minority interests and their representation in the political system. It contends that Bartolini’s (2004, 2005) framework linking ethnicity, territory, and party politics is better positioned to explain the process of minority claims formation than political exchange models based on agency and coalition building. Political agency does not take into account the incidence of sociodemographic structure, historical legacies, cultural distinctiveness, centralization of territorial governance, and factor mobility. Agency is embedded in an institutional setup and depends on the relative correspondence between societal cleavages and individual preferences. It is affected also by the differentiation of national political space as a result of the functional expediencies of European integration. In order to demonstrate the interplay of functional and territorial cleavages as a foundation of minority interests, the paper conducts a plausibility probe in a representative selection of case studies reflecting both the East-West distinction in European politics and the nature of minority demands as a result of institutional factors, cultural distinctiveness, and access to resources. Cases include “old” minorities in Western Europe (Scotland, Wales, Catalonia, and Sudtirol), regions with specific claims to self rule (the Basque region, Northern Ireland, and Flanders), regional concentrations of the ethnic Hungarian minority (Romania and Slovakia), the ethnic Turkish minority in Bulgaria, and minority-majority districts in the Baltic states. Collectively, the cases permit to conclude that as a result of the combination of territorial and functional cleavages and social identities, the likelihood for separatist demands decreases as a result of increased demands for representation and non-territorial aspects of autonomy through individual choice.