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Anethnic party is apolitical 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 withregionalist orseparatist parties, whose purpose is territorial autonomy.
There are varied definitions of both ethnicity and ethnic parties.[3]
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]
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]
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 inFinland,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 interwarPoland andLithuania had a range of different political views. There were Zionist parties (themselves divided into Revisionist, General, Religious or Labour parties), there wasAgudat Israel (an Orthodox religious party), theBund (Marxist) and theFolkspartei (liberal).
In some political systems, party politics are mostly based on ethnicity, as inBosnia-Herzegovina and its federal regions, inIsrael, inSuriname, inSabah, inSarawak or inGuyana. InFiji, 46 seats out of 71 are elected from ethnically-closedCommunal constituencies, as there was in the pre-IsraelPalestine Jewish Assembly, theAsefat ha-Nivharim with separate 'curiae' forAshkenaz,Sepharad and Oriental, andYemeni Jews.
As a consequence, it would be somewhat irrelevant to classify some parties in these systems as 'ideological' (social-democrat,liberal,christian democratic etc.) and some others as 'purelyautonomist', 'purelyethnic' or 'purelyminority' parties.
TheSwedish People's Party of Finland (SFP) is a full-fledged member of theLiberal International, as well as theMovement for Rights and Freedoms, representing the Turkish minority inBulgaria, theSouth Tyrol People's Party (SVP, grouping German- and Ladin-speaking inhabitants of Italy'sSouth Tyrol province) is a member of the Christian DemocraticEuropean People's Party, whereas theSocial Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), anIrish Catholic party inNorthern Ireland is a member of theSocialist International, etc.
In interwar Poland, Jewish, German and Ukrainian parties never attracted allPolish 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.
Common lists or electoral agreements can be organized either between ethnic parties (Flemish parties 'Kartel's for municipal elections in Brussels orUnion des Francophones inFlemish Brabant, the coalition for the 2001 parliamentary elections in Bulgaria between the - mostly Turkish -Movement for Rights and Freedoms and the Roma partyEuroroma) or between two parties having common ideological options beyond ethnic differences, as the Bund and the 'Polish' socialist partyPPS for the municipal elections in 1939.
Some ethnic parties only take part in substatal electoral competition, thus making them somewhat invisible to outside observers: theSouth Schleswig Voter Federation in the German state ofSchleswig-Holstein, the German parties inDenmark (Schleswig Party) andPoland (German Minority in Silesia), theSilesian Autonomy Movement in Poland, theRomani parties inSlovakia (Roma Civic Initiative).
It can occur that a single 'supra-ideological' party seeks, with varying degrees of success, to represent the whole of the ethnic group, as for theSwedish People's Party inFinland, theSouth Schleswig Voter Federation for Danes andFrisians in the German state ofSchleswig-Holstein, theUnity for Human Rights Party for Greeks in Albania, theSlovene Union forSlovenes in north-eastern Italy, theMovement for Rights and Freedoms for Turks in Bulgaria, theDemocratic Union of Hungarians in Romania. Alternatively, a separate system of left- and right-leaning ethnic parties may arise alongside the mainstream parties, as with theDemocratic Union for Integration and theVLEN Coalition, which compete for the votes ofAlbanians in North Macedonia.
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 theCommunists, whose founders and subsequent leaders came mostly from ethnic/religious minorities (Arab Christians, Jews,Kurds,Armenians and others). The socialist movement inThessaloniki (present Northern Greece) during the last decade of theOttoman Empire was divided across ethnic lines between theSephardi 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]
Some countries createreserved seats in their legislatures for ethnic minorities. In such a case, ethnic parties may primarily or solely compete to win these seats. Examples of this include theIndependent Democratic Serb Party which competes for theSabor'sSerb reserved seats and theMaori Party, competing primarily in theMāori electorates.
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, orHentchak) parties belong to this category, as well as the international sections of national parties, such as the (U.S.)Republicans Abroad andDemocrats Abroad, the (French)Parti socialiste's Fédération des Français de l'étranger or the American and European branches of the IsraeliLikud and of theKuomintang (Nationalist Party of China).
There can also be specific political groupings representing members of a national community living abroad, such as theAssociation démocratique des Français de l'étranger - Français du Monde (left-wing) and theUnion des Français de l'Etranger (right-wing), both competing for seats in theAssemblée des Français de l'étranger (fr), or the various political lists competing for theComitati degli italiani all'estero (COMITES).
