Minority Party Success in Heterogeneous European Countries

Abstract: In this paper, we examine minorities’ success in nine national parliamentary elections. Theory of consociational (or power-sharing) democracy suggests that, in heterogeneous societies, a proportional electoral system will treat minority parties most fairly. The OSCE Lund Recommendations on the Effective Participation of National Minorities in Public Life proposes a number of electoral system features, which would improve minority representation. Bearing these points in mind, we set out to investigate the difference between various parties’ votes and seats, as measured by an Advantage-ratio of votes and seats. In order to control for the size of the party, non-minority parties were divided into small and large parties. We determined that the main points affecting minority success were factors such as the geographical concentration and political unity of the minority rather than the electoral system itself. Moreover, the size of the party was a major factor governing success in all the systems investigated; large parties benefited in all the elections studied.