Entropy Resistant Cultures in Frail Nation-States: the Radicalism of the Ethno-Regionalist Parties in Central and Eastern Europe.

While we have been witnessing bloody secessionist movements and inter-ethnic conflicts in several Central and Eastern European countries, such as those of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Moldova, Ukraine etc., we have also observed democratization in the mobilization of these ethno-regionalist movements in the transitioning period, i.e., proliferation of ethno-regionalist party (ERP). In spite of the unbalanced, in scope and method, literature on the post-communist societies if compared to the Western democracies, the scholars have moved from the overly represented works on post-conflict societies and inter-ethnic conciliation, to addressing ethno-regionalism in CEE from the perspective of party politics. The main switch of scholarship attention in both Western and Eastern European ethno-regionalist politics, nonetheless, is the one from treating ethnic-regionalist parties as a ‘zero-sum’ game factors (power-sharing theory) to seeing them as vote-maximizers and strategic players in the electoral competition (outbidding and nested competition theories). Secessionism, thus, shall be treated as political parties appeal in this work. We are interested in what explains the radicalism of those entropy resistant mobilized cultures in CEE? The research question is: what accounts for the radicalism of the self-determination claims of the ethno-regionalist parties of Central and Eastern Europe? For the purpose of finding the answers to our hypotheses we shall use empirical/quantitative method for testing twelve hypotheses on the dependent variable ‘radicalism of the self-determination claims of ERPs in CEE’. These hypotheses are to be grouped in three main clusters: the first one embracing the electoral competition constellations in a polity, the second one including countries’ level of decentralization/regional authority and the pressure of the EU conditionality for Candidate Countries, and the last one encompassing countries’ socio- economic and democratic development. We initially target party manifestos from 90 ERPs coming from 17 CEE countries in the period of 1989-2015, and eventually analyze 72 of them. The dependent variable is initially measured trough five ordinal categories: Protectionist, Autonomist_Municipal, Autonomist_Regional, Federalist and Secessionist ERPs. The main argument of this thesis is that the intra-ethnic outbidding theory prevails when explaining the ERPs’ strategies for ideological radicalism. We hereby infer that ERPs’ size, electoral fragmentation, inclusion of competitive ERP in previous governments, party’s age, and current level of regional government are statistically significant factors of radicalism of ERPs’ self-determination appeals. On the contrary, we find the higher level of liberal democracy of a polity and the higher level of corruption to be significant moderators of ERPs’ radicalism. The thesis is being structured in five chapters, starting with Chapter 1 where we offer the working definition of the concept of Ethno-regionalist party, which is subject to analysis (the ‘what’ question of the thesis). In Section 1.2. we elaborate other theoretical and analytical frameworks of analysis. We then, pose the Research questions and construct our Hypotheses (the ‘how’ question), and we turn to the added value of this dissertation for literature ( the ‘why’ question). We shall approach the end of the first Chapter by explaining the research design, the data and the method (the ‘when’ and ‘where’ questions), where we include a short emphasis of the unit of analysis, the case selection and data, the operationalization of the dependent variable “radicalism of the self-determination claims”, and the final specification of the method of categorization of the parties’ manifestos. The scouting of the Central and Eastern Europe, with two separate emphases on the entropy-resistant categories (the ethno-regional groups) and the frail nation states (the nationalizing states in between regime change, transition and stability) is to be done in Chapter 2. Moreover, we shall put an emphasis on the political and electoral systems of the countries of CEE from a comparative perspective, their level of regionalization, socio-economic change and conflicts occurring due to inter-ethnic intolerance. Chapter 3 will depict the origins of ERP in CEE (where, when and how many?) by offering insights into the success and failure of the ERP in CEE through their lifespan, as well as a general picture of the electoral fortunes of the ERPs from today’s comparative perspective. Chapter 4 thoroughly elaborates the definition and the measurement of the radicalism of ERPs from a comparative perspective. We shall understand the operationalization of the level of radicalism of ERPs’ self-determination demands, we shall learn about the method and technique for coding ERPs’ manifestos, and from the manifestos coding results we shall eventually compare the ERPs’ radicalism in CEE. In the concluding Chapter 5 we shall finally approach towards the empirical test of the radicalism of the ERPs in CEE. We offer a glimpse into the results from the ordered logistic regressions with the dependent variable operationalized as an ordinal variable with three categories, the predicted probabilities for radicalism of the ERPs in CEE with changes on values of the independent variables, and additional diagnostics and predictions on restricted samples (exclusion of potential influential cases). At the end we will offer some final concluding remarks, emphasis on the new puzzles and perspectives for future research.