Electoral systems and ethnic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe: from transition to consolidation of democracy

Abstract

Some ten years ago, and within the framework of a collective reflection on the politics of national minority participation in post Communist Europe, I proposed a classification of the diverse ways in which the electoral laws of these countries were addressing the problem of the parliamentary representation of ethnic minorities. In that essay, I argued that formulas contained in these electoral laws had swung from the extreme hostility of those prohibiting the creation of ethnically based parties, to the inclusiveness of those where ethnicity had been converted into the very basis of political representation, going through a wide range of intermediate strategies like hindering that representation, being indifferent towards it, facilitating it in practice, and providing legal guarantees for it.
Now in a context in which democracy is already consolidated, the legacy of the Balkan wars is gradually disappearing, and ten of these countries are already part of the EU, it is easy to anticipate that the perception of what should be an adequate treatment for national minorities in electoral laws should have substantially changed. On the basis of the above mentioned paradigms, this paper examines the manners in which these laws have changed their treatment of national minorities, seeks to give an explanation as to why these changes have taken place, and tries to assess their implications in the parliamentary representation of minorities —and, even more, in its social and political integration— throughout the region.