Strategies of Ethnic Parties in Local Elections

Compared to other political parties, ethnic parties do not mobilise the broader population of a country but rather focus on the specific interests of ethnic minorities. As such, they differ from other parties in terms of their manifestoes, their electoral support, and their mobilisation strategies (Gunther and Diamond 2003). Given their specific features, it is not surprising that in subnational elections, these parties operate to a larger extent primarily in areas inhabited by the ethnic minorities they represent. According to the extant literature, the existence of more than one ethnic party in a country typically results in ethnic outbidding, i.e., adoption of more radical or even extreme positions of ethnic parties (Horowitz 1985; Zuber and Szöczik 2015). In other words, a competition for a numerically limited segment of minority voters motivates ethnic parties to stress their ethnic positions, what eventually polarises the intra-ethnic competition. While this behaviour is likely to appear in national politics, the question is how intra-ethnic partisan competition affects the local strategies of the respective ethnic parties. Based on previous findings, the local demographic context provides ethnic parties with various opportunities and also constraints as it allows ethnic outbidding to be an option in some areas while it makes it a tactical risk in others (Stroschein 2011). In this paper, we focus on the electoral strategies of ethnic parties in such an outbidding scenario. Our analysis covers Slovakia, a country with a traditionally strong Hungarian minority with a well developed political and partisan representation. Between 2009 and 2020, the country witnessed a rivalry of SMK - a previously dominating Hungarian party - and its splinter the party Bridge with a more moderate stance in ethnic issues. The paper aims to analyse the strategies of these two parties in three local elections. We use data from three local elections between 2012 and 2020 with more than 6,800 municipalities with competitive elections. The outcomes indicate that in areas with a dominance of the country’s ethnic minority, the likelihood of more radical ethnic party to participate in the elections is higher than the moderate ethnic party. Also, in towns where the ethnic minority is the local majority, a further increase of ethnic minority share produces rivalry of both ethnic parties rather than their cooperation. The results thus show that in the case of an intra-ethnic partisan competition, the local demographics substantially affects the electoral strategies adopted by the respective ethnic parties.