Ethnic Minorities, Political Competition, and Democracy: Circumstantial Liberals

Ethnic minorities make contemporary Europe increasingly diverse. The wisdom in research on ethnicity is that it is a trouble-maker disrupting programmatic politics, prioritizing group identity over ideology, polity over policy, principle over compromise. In this book, Jan Rovny approaches ethnic politics as normal politics, and investigates the ideological potential of ethnicity. He shows that ethnic minorities often search for group preservation by championing liberal rights that would protect them from the tyranny of the majority. This translates into broader ideological preferences and political behavior, including the formation of liberal political poles, which in turn configures political cleavages, shapes party systems, and informs the absorption of new political issues. Ultimately, the presence of ethnic minorities can be a force for liberal democracy.

Simultaneously, ethnic liberalism is circumstantial, as conditional factors cross-pressure ethnic minority search for rights and liberties, potentially attenuating ethnic liberalism and inducing exclusionary particularism. This book combines the study of ethnic politics with research on electoral behavior and party competition, while comparing minorities and majorities in eastern Europe. The book analyzes existing and new data using mixed experimental, quantitative, and qualitative methods. The empirical chapters in the book are organized into two parts, one focusing on large-N comparative analyses, while the other presents three in-depth case studies on interwar Czechoslovakia, contemporary Slovakia, and contemporary Estonia.

Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, and environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states to supranational institutions, subnational governments, and public-private networks. It brings together work that advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars.

The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.

Jan Rovny, Associate Professor, Sciences Po, Paris

Jan Rovny is Associate Professor in Political Science at Sciences Po in Paris. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his work focuses on political competition, party politics, and the effects of ethnicity in Europe, east and west. He has published widely in journals such as the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and World Politics.