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Ethnic Threat Lit Review Explaining Voter Moderation In Post-Communist Ethnic Party Systems: A Cross-National Investigation in the Balkans1 Paula M. Pickering College of William and Mary [email protected] Abstract: In this paper, I explore conditions that contribute to a rare outcome in ethnic party systems: the election of parties with moderate positions on interethnic relations. More specifically, I investigate why voters of the small, impoverished, and ethnically fragmented states of Bosnia and Macedonia, which share the same electoral system, chose parties with divergent positions on interethnic relations in 2002. Statistical analysis of survey data, content analysis of local media, and analysis of institutional arrangements help understand this puzzle. I find that political institutions, the parties supplied by elites, and external intervention interact to offer voters in Macedonia stronger options for moderation than in Bosnia. These rules and actors magnify small differences in preferences among citizens in the two states. One of the institutional arguments suggests that voting for moderate parties in Macedonia is partly an artifact, rather than an intentional expression of interest in interethnic cooperation. This sobering finding emphasizes the fragility of moderation in Macedonia’s ethnic party system. 1 Across the globe, states that are deeply divided have embarked on the already arduous process of democratization. In such contexts, voter moderation is particularly crucial for the success of democratization, the prevention of communal violence, and regional stability. Unfortunately, it is rare. In this paper, I explore conditions that contribute to voter support for parties with moderate positions on interethnic relations in deeply divided states with ethnic party systems. Here, I conceive of “moderation” as concern for issues that are not necessarily ethnically defined and willingness to engage in cross-ethnic cooperation. More specifically, I investigate voters of the two strikingly similar countries of Bosnia and Macedonia, which are small, impoverished, ethnically fragmented, and threatened states that arose out of Yugoslavia.2 Despite these similarities and their shared electoral system, voters chose parties with divergent positions on interethnic relations in 2002. This puzzle of voter moderation in post-war ethnic party systems, like those in Bosnia and Macedonia, addresses several issues of concern in comparative politics. The first is identifying the forces in ethnic party systems that work to overcome tremendous centrifugal and exclusivist pressures that such party systems generate. Macedonia bucked a regional trend, illustrated by Bosnia,3 in which interethnic violence radicalizes voters and encourages the election of ethnically chauvinistic parties, which then generates a cycle of instability. More broadly, understanding factors that explain how an impoverished, deeply divided, and contested state with an ethnic party system manages to encourage moderate voting and mitigate violent conflict has significant implications for similarly fragile states such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Rwanda, Moldova, and Tajikistan. Second, I examine voting in two important deeply divided societies in South Eastern Europe that have produced, and have the potential to produce additional, violence that could not only devastate their citizens, but also destabilize the region. Third, I use literature on elections to examine comparatively and systematically electoral outcomes in the former Yugoslav region, while scholars of elections in Eastern Europe have generally confined their focus to countries in East Central Europe. I first sketch the political context for ethnic politics in the region. Then I investigate several prominent alternative arguments for explaining the relative moderation of voters in Macedonia. Richard Rose and Neil Munro argue that election outcomes are a function of laws, the parties supplied by elites, and how voters respond to the choices offered.4 I look first at literature on how institutions and external actors structure political behavior in democratizing 2 countries and ethnic party systems. Given these constraints, how might citizens’ values and beliefs factor into their voting? Drawing on analysis of institutional arrangements and external intervention, content analysis of party campaigning, and quantitative analysis of public opinion data, I examine the hypotheses I derived from the literature described above. I argue that institutional and external factors interact with grass-roots attitudes to explain the victory of moderates in Macedonia's elections. I close by discussing the implications of this work and suggesting further research. DEEPLY DIVIDED POLITICAL CONTEXT In a culturally diverse Eastern Europe, pressures exerted by ethnic entrepreneurs for collective rights have sometimes threatened national integration, challenged state control, and deterred democracy.5 Until 1991, Bosnia and Macedonia were the most ethnically heterogeneous republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Three ethnic groups -- Bosnian Muslims (now called Bosniaks), Serbs, and Croats – dominate Bosnia; two ethnic groups – Macedonians and Albanians – dominate Macedonia.6 These republics were at the center of the Yugoslav communists’ efforts to overcome extremism of WWII and promote interethnic cooperation.7 In socialist Yugoslavia, people constructed a sense of who they were and what it meat to be, for example, a Croat, based on their experiences and their interactions with neighboring groups and official categories.8 Despite this complex social reality, many elites in Yugoslavia propagated a “crisis” frame of hostile interethnic relations that had been dormant since WWII to replace the “normal” frame of positive interethnic relations, in order to take advantage of crumbling socialist legitimacy, regional devolution, elite competition, economic decline, and mass frustration in the late 1980s.9 Cognizant of the fragility of their republics, however, leaders of the titular nations in Bosnia and Macedonia were not eager to secede from Yugoslavia and instead offered political compromises. These proposals were rejected by the strongest elites, who were bent on dismantling Yugoslavia. Serbia and Croatia’s leaders egged on and armed their co-ethnic parties in Bosnia to violently ethnically partition a republic they claimed was dangerously dominated by Bosniaks. After NATO’s intervention into Bosnia ended four years of war, the international community in 1995 imposed a political system intended to promote compromise. The Dayton constitution encourages mass-level mixing, such as promoting refugee return to prewar homes. It also, 3 however, reinforces ethnic divisions and separation through complex ethnic power-sharing arrangements among the three constituent nations, including territorial divisions. In comparison with Bosnia’s neighbors, Macedonia’s neighbors, while threatening, were less interested in, and less able, to violently intervene. Despite the disgruntlement of Macedonia’s Albanian citizens,10 it was not until 2001 that Albanian extremists in Kosovo helped spark an insurrection among segments of Macedonia's Albanian population ostensibly for “political and financial control over municipalities with Albanian majorities.”11 NATO and EU officials intervened within months to encourage the formation of a temporary government of national unity and to mediate the Ohrid Framework Agreement.12 The peace agreement compelled Macedonia to adopt constitutional changes that encouraged ethnic power-sharing.13 Electoral systems also shape political behavior by counting votes and assigning parliamentary seats.14 Bosnia and Macedonia share a proportional representation (PR) electoral system with multiple multi-member districts. This system interacts with ethnic diversity to foster a multiparty system in which it is difficult, but not impossible in Macedonia’s case, to form a government without entering into a multiethnic coalition. The number of seats allocated to each district affects party competition; the fewer the seats in a multi-member district, the larger the proportion of the vote that a party must win in order to gain a seat there.15 Bosnia’s electorates in its entities – the Bosniak-Croat Federation & the Republika Srpska – are divided into five and three multi-member electoral districts, respectively.16 The district magnitude varies from three to six. Macedonia’s electorate is divided into six multi-member electoral districts, where the district magnitude is 20.17 These rules encourage the proliferation of parties. Both countries possess ethnic party systems, which are dominated by ethnic parties, or parties that derive their support overwhelmingly from one ethnic group and appeal to only one ethnic group.18 Ethnic parties developed during the transition from one-party rule partly because of the prominence of ethnicity in the modern Balkans and socialist Yugoslavia's reinforcement of ethnicity.19 The tendency for the electorate to divide along ethnic lines was reinforced by the power-sharing arrangements contained in the 1990 constitutions, electoral sequences in 1991,20 and the post-violence agreements. Ethnic party systems compel all parties to take up ethnic causes in order to remain competitive.21 Ethnic party systems also often create incentives for radical appeals to the electorate, because parties can rarely win the votes of other ethnic groups. 4 Table 1: Similarity of Cases Bosnia Macedonia Political history Ethnically heterogeneous
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