Ethnic parties and the EPAC expert survey

Often, competition among ethnic minority parties is nested in a broader system of interaction with mainstream, non-ethnic parties. Christina's theory of “nested competition” argues that ethnic outbidding is less frequent than assumed because imperfectly ethnically segmented party systems offer incentives for ethnic parties to moderate. To test the theory and gain so far unavailable data on the positioning of political parties on an ethnonational dimension of party competition, Edina Szöcsik and Christina conducted an original expert survey between June and October 2011. Compiled on the basis of the collected expert ratings, our dataset on ethnonationalism in party competition (EPAC) covers the positions of 210 political parties in 22 multinational European democracies. In 2017, they completed the second round of EPAC (EPAC 2017). To see what can be done with the two time points, check out this article that uses the the 2011 and 2017 data to investigate whether decentralisation spurs minority party secessionism.

EPAC 2011 and 2017 editions are available, click here for access to the data!

With the great help of Anna and Flora, we are currently selecting parties and experts for the third round of EPAC, scheduled to go into the field in 2023! 

Many of the insights behind this cross-national data collection effort were inspired by field research in Serbia (April – June 2010) where Christina conducted interviews with elites of Hungarian and Bosniak ethnic minority parties.