Home>"Ethnic Minorities, Political Competition, and Democracy", new book by Jan Rovny
06.09.2024
"Ethnic Minorities, Political Competition, and Democracy", new book by Jan Rovny
Ethnic Minorities, Political Competition, and Democracy: Circumstantial Liberals, Jan Rovny's new book, was published this summer (2024) by Oxford University Press, in the Transformations in Governance book series.
Description
Ethnic minorities make contemporary Europe increasingly diverse. The wisdom in research on ethnicity is that it is a trouble-maker disrupting programmatic politics, prioritizing group identity over ideology, polity over policy, principle over compromise. In this book, Jan Rovny approaches ethnic politics as normal politics, and investigates the ideological potential of ethnicity. He shows that ethnic minorities often search for group preservation by championing liberal rights that would protect them from the tyranny of the majority. This translates into broader ideological preferences and political behavior, including the formation of liberal political poles, which in turn configures political cleavages, shapes party systems, and informs the absorption of new political issues. Ultimately, the presence of ethnic minorities can be a force for liberal democracy.
Simultaneously, ethnic liberalism is circumstantial, as conditional factors cross-pressure ethnic minority search for rights and liberties, potentially attenuating ethnic liberalism and inducing exclusionary particularism. This book combines the study of ethnic politics with research on electoral behavior and party competition, while comparing minorities and majorities in eastern Europe. The book analyzes existing and new data using mixed experimental, quantitative, and qualitative methods. The empirical chapters in the book are organized into two parts, one focusing on large-N comparative analyses, while the other presents three in-depth case studies on interwar Czechoslovakia, contemporary Slovakia, and contemporary Estonia.
Author
Jan Rovny is a Full Professor in Political Science at Sciences Po and a member of the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his work focuses on political competition, party politics, and the effects of ethnicity in Europe, East and West. He has published widely in journals such as the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and World Politics.
