Mainstream Parties and Ethnic Minority Candidates in Romania
Mainstream Parties and Ethnic Minority Candidates in Romania

Author(s): Marius Lupșa Matichescu
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences
Published by: Scientia Kiadó
Summary/Abstract: The paper will explore the mainstream parties’ strategies in recruiting ethnic minority candidates. Considering that the mainstream parties’ efforts to gain the support of ethnic minority voters could be penalized by ethnic majority voters, we focus our investigation on the following issues: What type of mainstream parties and when are they likely to ignore these risks and recruit minority candidates for office? We argue that a mainstream party’s decision to recruit minority candidates is a function of the party voters’ views of the ethnic other and the politicians’ calculations of electoral benefits of minority support. We expect that parties whose voter base is more accepting of the ethnic other are more likely to recruit minority candidates than parties whose electorate is less ethnically tolerant. The party voters’ attitudes toward ethnic diversity rather than the party’s generic ideological family orientation should thus shape the party’s recruitment strategies. In the Romanian case, the empirical supports for these hypotheses are exanimate based on party recruitment behaviour. The dataset used contains candidates both for the lower and upper chamber of the Romanian parliament for all parliamentary elections since 1992 in counties where ethnic Hungarians constitute more than 10% of the population.

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