CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Taleski, Dane |
|---|---|
| Title | Competition Between Minority Ethnic Parties In Post-Conflict Countries: Performance of Minority Parties in Croatia and Macedonia |
| Summary | Academic and policy studies argue that an inclusive approach is needed for sustainable peacebuilding. This justifies the inclusion of former combatants into political parties, but some argue that it can have negative consequences for democratization. Institutional engineering is proposed to forge cross-cutting parties; however, it is puzzling to find that parties from rebels often dominate in the post-conflict period. To address this puzzle I look at minority ethnic parties in post-conflict Croatia and Macedonia. SDSS dominates the competition between Serb parties in Croatia and DUI dominates between Albanian parties in Macedonia. To answer why this is so, I first look at the process of their formation and functioning and second I compared them to other minority parties. Despite the common history in Yugoslavia, the inter-ethnic conflicts, the post-conflict conditions and institutional environments for minority politics were very different in Croatia and Macedonia. My level of analysis is the competition between minority parties in each country. Because of the similar outcomes, under varying conditions, I consider that the finding in one country control for the other. Using process tracing I analyzed data from 78 interviews, party content, media and archival sources. The findings were corroborated with quantitative analysis of electoral data from national and sub-national elections in the entire post-conflict period. I find that SDSS and DUI became most successful minority parties because they institutionalized legacies from the conflict. The parties were built on war time networks. They utilized these networks as micro social units for communication with voters and electoral mobilization. They also transferred symbolic capital from the conflict, initiated social practices to preserve it and used it as part of their electoral appeal. They channeled the post-conflict reconstruction process and gained political control over instruments for minority inclusion which gave them possibilities to extend patronage. Institutionalization of conflict's legacies in conjunction with patronage explains their electoral dominance in the post-conflict period. Other parties able to copy this model, albeit on sub-national level or to a lesser degree, were able to win or to improve their electoral support. These findings improve the understanding about post-conflict party politics, and in particular performance of parties from rebels, and contribute to literature about minority ethnic parties in competition. |
| Supervisor | Bozoki, Andras |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/taleski_dane.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University