Between Conflict and Cooperation: Electoral Strategies of Ethnic Parties

The paper analyses the impact of local demography on the electoral strategies of ethnic political parties. We focus on Hungarian parties in Slovakia and their tactics of fielding candidates in the 2014 and 2018 mayoral elections in 4,461 municipalities with competitive elections. We find that local demography is an essential explanatory factor concerning the strategies of ethnic parties. Our results show that in towns where an ethnic minority predominates, ethnic parties are more likely to challenge each other in elections. On the other hand, we find only little support for the split demography hypothesis that ethnic parties will cooperate in such an environment. Although Hungarian parties form alliances in these municipalities, their occurrence is not different than in towns where the same ethnic group dominates the local population. Finally, we observe that in areas where Hungarians are a numerical minority, inter-ethnic alliances are formed, but only by the more moderate ethnic party. In general, the paper shows that the ethnic composition of municipalities can provide incentives to avoid ethnic outbidding as well as to enhance intra-ethnic rivalry.