What’s in a name? Ethnic party identity and democratic development in post-communist politics

Abstract

There has been surprisingly little literature differentiating between different kinds of ethnic parties. Most works tend to treat all ethnic parties as if they are basically the same. Although, to be sure, there have been some notable works attempting to differentiate types of ethnic parties, they tend to emphasize the territorial or political demands made by ethnic parties to distinguish the different types rather than the parties’ organizational identity. In this article, rather than examine what they demand, we distinguish them by their organizational identities, or how they present themselves to an electorate — in particular via the names they adopt. We argue that parties portraying themselves as representative of a particular group and including that group in the party’s name are different from parties that portray themselves in non-ethnic ways (by not including the group in its name). In particular, the latter not only attract different kinds of supporters, but are more likely to bring their supporters into greater acceptance of democracy, and hence more likely to promote democratic consolidation than parties that portray themselves more exclusively.