Ethnic Minorities and Left Party Response: Explaining Party Competition in Eastern Europe

This paper argues that party competition structure in eastern Europe is importantly determined by partisan responses to critical social divides which have survived through the communist era, most importantly the issue of ethnic minority rights. This paper identifies left party responses to ethnic minorities as crucial. Where the main ethnic minority consists of members of the nation that dominated the country under a communist federation, left parties support the ethnic minorities or develop multi-ethnic profiles. This consequently shapes the main conflict lines of the party system, and frames the structure of party competition. The paper tests these hypotheses using quantitative data from the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys on political parties, covering fourteen eastern European countries: Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia. It also illustrates the quantitative conclusions by providing qualitative evidence from a number of cases across the region.