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.
Definitions
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)
