Networks of Minority Organizations in Multiethnic Cities. The cases of Košice, Pécs and Timisoara

The paper examines minority non-profit organizations and their interorganizational relationships in three localities. Kosice (Slovakia), Pécs (Hungary) and Timisoara (Romania) have been selected because of their multiethnic character: each city gives home to multiple minority communities, which maintain various types of institutions to achieve their specific goals and meet their needs. While Košice and Timisoara give home to one relatively larger minority (Hungarian in both cases) and several smaller (German, Roma, etc.), Pécs is the home of three communities of comparable sizes (Croat, German and Roma), and some smaller. The multi-ethnic character of the studied cities makes it possible to examine the minority organizational networks side by side, and thus to see their interconnection or mutual isolation, and to compare the structure of the networks of different minorities. The paper is based on primary interview and survey data collection, and presents the minority institutional networks of these three county seats: the main characteristics of the minority non-profit organizations, their conditions of operation and interoganizational relationships. The first wave was conducted in 2017, and the cities will be revisited for a second wave in first half of 2022. Exchange of information, cooperation, support ties, overlapping membership, ties of esteem, and perceived influence were studied. The study of negative ties was unsuccessful due to respondents’ unwillingness to name such contacts. The first wave of survey found that while interethnic ties are not completely absent, most organizations prefer ties with organizations belonging to the same minority. This was not only true for larger minorities that have plenty of opportunity for homophilic ties, but also smaller minorities. Homophily was extremely strong in the case of all types of ties except ties of esteem and perceived influence, which make it possible to study, how the local minority insitutional systems are perceived from the outside by the other minorities. The degree of concentration is relatively high in the networks, which tend to form with influential and relatively professionalized “public institutions disguised as NPOs” (cf. Kiss 2006) in the center with smaller CSOs on the semi-periphery and periphery. Subcultural/communitarian mode of coordination of collective action (cf. Diani 2015) proved to be the dominant. The degree to which networks changed in the last five years remains to be studied.