An ethnic party is a political party that overtly presents itself as the champion of one ethnic group or sets of ethnic groups.[1][2] Ethnic parties make such representation central to their voter mobilization strategy.[1] An alternate designation is 'Political parties of minorities', but they should not be mistaken with regionalist or separatist parties, whose purpose is territorial autonomy.
There are varied definitions of both ethnicity and ethnic parties.[3]
Ethnicity
Kanchan Chandra defines ethnic identity narrowly as a subset of identity categories determined by the belief of common descent. She rejects expansive definitions of ethnic identity (such as those that include common culture, common language, common history and common territory).[4] Jóhanna Birnir defines ethnicity as "group self-identification around a characteristic that is very difficult or even impossible to change, such as language, race, or location."[5]
Ethnic party
According to Donna Lee Van Cott,
Ethnic party is defined here as an organization authorized to compete in local or national elections; the majority of its leadership and membership identify themselves as belonging to a nondominant ethnic group, and its electoral platform includes demands and programs of an ethnic or cultural nature.[6][7]
According to Kanchan Chandra,
An ethnic party is a party that overtly represents itself as a champion of the cause of one particular ethnic category or set of categories to the exclusion of others, and that makes such a representation central to its strategy of mobilizing voters.[1]
Historical ethnic parties
The oldest prototypes of ethnic parties are the Jewish parties of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, e.g. Bund, Folkspartei, World Agudath Israel, and the Swedish party in Finland, Svenska Folkpartiet (SFP), all of them founded in the end of the 19th century or in the first decade of the 20th.
Ethnic parties may take different ideological positions.
For instance, the parties competing for Jewish votes in interwar Poland and Lithuania had a range of different political views. There were Zionist parties (themselves divided into Revisionist, General, Religious or Labour parties), there was Agudat Israel (an Orthodox religious party), the Bund (Marxist) and the Folkspartei (liberal).
In interwar Poland, Jewish, German and Ukrainian parties never attracted all Polish Jews, Germans and Ukrainians of whom some were members of 'national' ideological Polish parties, mostly the Socialist and Communist parties, who were considered more open-minded than the conservative or nationalist parties.
Ethnic parties and elections
Common lists or electoral agreements can be organized either between ethnic parties (Flemish parties 'Kartel's for municipal elections in Brussels or Union des Francophones in Flemish Brabant, the coalition for the 2001 parliamentary elections in Bulgaria between the - mostly Turkish - Movement for Rights and Freedoms and the Roma party Euroroma) or between two parties having common ideological options beyond ethnic differences, as the Bund and the 'Polish' socialist party PPS for the municipal elections in 1939.
In most cases, ethnic parties compete inside electoral systems where voters aren't compelled to vote according to ethnic affiliations and may vote too for 'non ethnic', 'transethnic' or 'supraethnic' ideological parties, in contrast to a political arrangement where parties' support bases are primarily found among specific ethnic or religious groups. In most Near Eastern Arab countries, the only such parties were the Communists, whose founders and subsequent leaders came mostly from ethnic/religious minorities (Arab Christians, Jews, Kurds, Armenians and others). The socialist movement in Thessaloniki (present Northern Greece) during the last decade of the Ottoman Empire was divided across ethnic lines between the Sephardi Jews (who formed the majority of the population), the Bulgarian and Macedonian Slavs and the Greeks, but all groups united when it came to election time.
A 2024 study found that when ethnic groups in Africa have an elected local ethnic party politician in parliament, they subsequently are more likely be employed.[8]
'Intraethnic parties', or political parties inside diasporic communities
There is also a specifically diasporic type of political parties that could be labelled as 'intraethnic parties', i.e. parties that compete only inside the diasporic political sphere.
The Jewish and Armenian (Dashnak, Ramgavar, or Hentchak) parties belong to this category, as well as the international sections of national parties, such as the (U.S.) Republicans Abroad and Democrats Abroad, the (French) Parti socialiste's Fédération des Français de l'étranger or the American and European branches of the Israeli Likud and of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party of China).
↑ Donna Lee Van Cott, “Institutional Change and Ethnic Parties in South America.” Latin American Politics and Society 45, 2 (summer 2003): 1-39 (abstract)
↑ Donna Lee Van Cott, From Movements to Parties in Latin America. The Evolution of Ethnic Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005 ISBN978-0-521-85502-0 (Introduction)
The electoral threshold, or election threshold, is the minimum share of all the votes cast that a candidate or political party requires to achieve before they become entitled to representation or additional seats in a legislature. This limit can operate in various ways, e.g. in party-list proportional representation systems where an electoral threshold requires that a party must receive a specified minimum percentage of votes, either nationally or in a particular electoral district, to obtain seats in the legislature. In single transferable voting, the election threshold is called the quota and it is possible to pass it by use of first choice votes alone or by a combination of first choice votes and votes transferred from other candidates based on lower preferences. In mixed-member-proportional (MMP) systems the election threshold determines which parties are eligible for top-up seats in the legislative body.
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The South Schleswig Voters' Association is a regionalist political party in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany. The party represents the Danish and Frisian minorities of the state.
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As an organized nationalist movement, Zionism is generally considered to have been founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. However, the history of Zionism began earlier and is intertwined with Jewish history and Judaism. The organizations of Hovevei Zion, held as the forerunners of modern Zionist ideals, were responsible for the creation of 20 Jewish towns in Palestine between 1870 and 1897.
In world politics, Jewish state is a characterization of Israel as the nation-state and sovereign homeland of the Jewish people.
Folksgrupe was a Jewish Anti-Zionist political organization in Russia, founded at a meeting in Vilna in March 1905. The organization proclaimed to work for establishing 'civil, political and national rights for the Jewish People in Russia'. The full name of the organization was the League for the Attainment of Full Rights for the Jewish People in Russia. Its followers were known as Dostizhentsi.
The Social Democratic Bund, or the General Jewish Labour Bund, the Bund (S.D.) or, later, the "Bund" in the Soviet Union, was a short-lived Jewish political party in Soviet Russia. It was formed as the Russian Bund was split at its conference in Gomel in April 1920. The Social Democratic Bund was formed out of the right-wing minority section of the erstwhile Russian Bund. The party was led by Raphael Abramovitch. After 1923, it continued to exist in exile.
The General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland was a Jewish socialist party in Poland which promoted the political, cultural and social autonomy of Jewish workers, sought to combat antisemitism and was generally opposed to Zionism.
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Bundism is a secular Jewish socialist movement whose first organizational manifestation was the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, and Russia, founded in the Russian Empire in 1897.
The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, generally called The Bund or the Jewish Labour Bund, was a secular Jewish socialist party initially formed in the Russian Empire and active between 1897 and 1920. In 1917 the Bund organizations in Poland seceded from the Russian Bund and created a new Polish General Jewish Labour Bund which continued to operate in Poland in the years between the two world wars. The majority faction of the Russian Bund was dissolved in 1921 and incorporated into the Communist Party. Other remnants of the Bund endured in various countries. A member of the Bund was called a Bundist.
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Constructivism presumes that ethnic identities are shapeable and affected by politics. Through this framework, constructivist theories reassesses conventional political science dogmas. Research indicates that institutionalized cleavages and a multiparty system discourage ethnic outbidding and identification with tribal, localized groups. In addition, constructivism questions the widespread belief that ethnicity inherently inhibits national, macro-scale identification. To prove this point, constructivist findings suggest that modernization, language consolidation, and border-drawing, weakened the tendency to identify with micro-scale identity categories. One manifestation of ethnic politics gone awry, ethnic violence, is itself not seen as necessarily ethnic, since it attains its ethnic meaning as a conflict progresses.
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