Ethnic practice in electoral politics: Bosnia and Herzegovina’s 1990 Presidency elections

Kapidžić, Damir

doi:10.1080/14683857.2014.974371

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…This is because of optional multiple votes that voters could cast (from one up to seven), and the ambiguous category of 'Others' that was co-opted by ethnic parties. A detailed analysis of these elections can be found in Kapidžić (2014 ) and will not be presented here.…”

Section: Election Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, municipalities divided between two large ethnic groups (high ethnic polarization) were less likely to vote for cross-ethnic options and non-ethnic candidates, even if this did not affect the vote for candidates of their own ethnic group. Thus, electoral incentives for interethnic voting in the Presidency elections had much more effect in highly diverse municipalities (Kapidžić, 2014).…”

Section: The Influence Of Electoral System Design In Democratic Transmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Democratic Transition and Electoral Design in Plural Societies: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina's 1990 Elections

Kapidžić

2015

Ethnopolitics

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The uncertainty of democratic transition poses a threat to the survival of ethnically plural societies, culminating in the first open elections. The design of the electoral system for the founding elections is therefore of crucial importance. This paper focuses on the democratic transition of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its founding elections in 1990. A variety of electoral systems, both proportional and majoritarian, were employed during these elections. With different incentives they attempted to reconcile inclusion and group representation, while fostering interethnic politics. Utilizing newly available election data and a within-case comparison, the paper analyses incentives and outcome of different electoral systems under least-likely conditions of success. As no single electoral system was able to overcome the predominance of particularistic ethnic politics during these elections, the paper concludes that under high levels of transitional uncertainty and low levels of ethnic inter-group relations, the choice of electoral system alone is often not enough to make a decisive difference in electoral outcome.

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Section: Election Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Influence Of Electoral System Design In Democratic Transmentioning

confidence: 99%

Democratic Transition and Electoral Design in Plural Societies: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina's 1990 Elections

Kapidžić

2015

Ethnopolitics

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“…EFI and EPI , on the other hand, represent the ethnic fractionalization index and the ethnic polarization index. As previously noted, both have been extensively used in the literatures on ethnic conflict and elections (Montalvo and Reynal-Querol 2005; Esteban and Ray 2011; Esteban, Mayoral, and Ray 2012; Kapidžić 2014). Ethnic fractionalization index represents the probability that two randomly chosen individuals from the municipal population belong to different ethnic groups.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, conflict is much more likely in communities with high levels of ethnic polarization, in other words, where usually two ethnic groups are nearly equal in size and competing for limited public resources. This line of reasoning has been applied in one of the rare data-driven studies of 1990 elections in the Yugoslav republics, where Kapidžić (2014) found that cross-ethnic and non-ethnic voting on the communal level in the 1990 elections to the presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina was positively related to ethnic diversity and negatively related to ethnic polarization.…”

Section: Deriving Hypotheses In the Context Of 1990 Yugoslaviamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It also, however, offers an important contribution to the study of democratic transitions in postcommunist Europe in general. In spite of their monumental importance in the history of European democracy, data-driven studies of the foundational democratic elections in Eastern Europe – and particularly in former Yugoslavia – have been rare (Heyns and Bialecki 1991; Kopstein and Richter 1992; Pacek 1994; Kapidžić 2014). Equally important, our study also offers insights into the electoral politics in societies on the verge of violent ethnic conflict.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The Failure of “Yugoslavia’s Last Chance”: Ante Marković and his Reformists in the 1990 Elections

Glaurdić

Filipović

Lesschaeve

2022

Nationalities Papers

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The last Prime Minister of Yugoslavia Ante Marković was considered by many within the country and in the international community to be Yugoslavia’s last chance for a peaceful transition toward democracy and capitalism. In spite of his popularity, the Reformist party he created failed decisively in the first democratic elections of 1990. We expose the reasons for this failure by analyzing electoral, economic, and sociodemographic data on the level of more than two hundred Yugoslav municipalities where the Reformists put forward their candidates. Our analysis shows that the party’s failure had little to do with the voters’ exposure to the effects of the free market reforms undertaken by Marković’s federal government during this period. Instead, the Reformists’ results were largely determined by the communities’ ethnic makeup and interethnic balance. The Reformists suffered at the hands of a strong negative campaign by the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević, and they were squeezed out by the ethnically based parties that benefited from voters behaving strategically in the electoral marketplace dominated by questions of nationalism. The analysis presented here offers important lessons for our understanding of Yugoslavia’s breakup, post-communist transitions in general, and electoral politics in societies on the verge of ethnic conflict.

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Ethnic Groups and Nations in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY)

Piacentini

2020

Ethnonationality’s Evolution in Bosnia Herzegovina and Macedonia

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Ethnic practice in electoral politics: Bosnia and Herzegovina’s 1990 Presidency elections

Cited by 5 publications

References 24 publications

Democratic Transition and Electoral Design in Plural Societies: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina's 1990 Elections

Democratic Transition and Electoral Design in Plural Societies: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina's 1990 Elections

The Failure of “Yugoslavia’s Last Chance”: Ante Marković and his Reformists in the 1990 Elections

Ethnic Groups and Nations in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY)

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