CIAO DATE: 05/2009
September 2008
European Centre for Minority Issues
Ensuring representation of ethnic minorities in national level decision making is one of the important challenges that ethnically diverse societies face. A number of alternative institutional arrangements aimed at securing minority representation has been discussed1 in the academic literature. This discussion is energized by the practical need to provide policy advice on how to craft institutions in ethnically plural states that go through the periods of democratization and/or post conflict reconciliation. While the relevance of this discussion is ensured by political developments in different parts of the world, the evidential base for judging the effectiveness of different institutional arrangements has remained somewhat limited. This is due partly to the newness of some institutional arrangements and partly to the lack of systematic inquiry into different type of consequences of choosing a specific mechanism of communal representation. For example, a recent review of reserved seat provisions, which constitute one type of targeted electoral mechanisms, suggests that reserved seats are much more common and much more understudied2 than it has usually been assumed.
Resource link: Representational Consequences of Special Mechanisms for Ethnic Minority Inclusion: Evidence from Romania [PDF] - 285K