Ethnic Enclaves and Entrenchment: Central or Local Control in City Politics

• In Event: Context, Interpretation, and Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

The emergence and persistence of hybrid regimes has become a recognized feature of several countries in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Rather than embracing truly competitive elections, elites may instead construct durable pyramids of power throughout a state – and use elections as a performance to legitimize their rule (Hale 2015). Even states that were democratic for a time might fall prey to ambitious elites who can manipulate institutions to entrench their rule over time (Gandhi 2018). Elites may further ensure a durable regime through an intentional distribution of economic resources to selected actors, both at the central and regional level (Migdal 1988, Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2009, Mares and Young 2019, Scheiring 2020). A tendency in Political Science literature to address the polity and the economy as separate spheres has rendered some of these dynamics less visible than they might be. In contrast, the entwined nature of the economy and the polity, particular in the former socialist space, has been more strongly recognized in sociological approaches (Stark and Bruszt 1998, Ganev 2007, Magyar, ed., 2019, Magyar and Madlovics 2022).

While this literature provides a strong foundation to understand the nature of durable control at the central level, more needs to be understood about the rollout of this control throughout the corners of a state. In recent years there has been a turn in Comparative Politics to examine local politics across a state, considering variations of power and control (Gibson 2005, Giraudy, Moncada and Snyder 2019).

With this local focus in mind, ethnic enclave cities, where ethnic minorities at the state level comprise the local majority, provide an interesting and useful test case for the reach of this central control. This is due to the fact that their default position is one of political distance from the center – particularly where ethnic groups are represented by ethnic parties. They may resist central control, or may be coopeted into the central pyramid. Local party politics in ethnic enclaves reflects the jockeying for power within an ethnic group, and can reveal the dynamics of when an enclave might exhibit more independence from or dependence on the political center. In these cities, political party rule is an indicator of these relations with the center.

This paper summarizes the results of a larger book manuscript. In the project, I trace trajectories of city council elections in ethnic enclave cities in four countries: Albanian-majority cities in North Macedonia, and Hungarian-majority cities in Serbia, Romania, and Slovakia. I examine local party control of city councils over time in these enclave cities, to trace their relations with central rule via the indicator of political parties. These trajectories tell varying stories – of political incorporation and cooptation over time, of durable local independence and resistance to co-optation, and of contested politics, where there may be a fight between actors supporting either political incorporation or independence. I focus on two main variables: reflectivity, or the degree to which the local party configuration reflects the center, and the durability of local party control. As contested elections in these countries began in the early 1990s, the project starts there and continues into the 2020s. Research and fieldwork for the project was supported by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) in the UK.

Author

• Sherrill Stroschein, University College London