Minority Language Recognition and Political Trust in Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

While authoritarian regimes are often characterized by their civil liberty restrictions, some dictatorships acknowledge the ethnolinguistic diversity of their population. Are minorities in multiethnic authoritarian states more likely to trust the government when their language is recognized? In this paper, we argue while recognition of a group’s language improves trust in democracies through a substantive representation mechanism, the same cannot be said in authoritarian regimes. Instead, recognition is a mere symbolic gesture. Such window-dressing efforts call attention to the horizontal inequality between hegemon and minority groups—and such, minority language recognition is associated with negative political trust. We test our argument with the World Values Survey. By identifying which minority groups have been afforded linguistic recognition, we find evidence of a significant—but negative—link between recognition and political trust.

Recognition Paradox: Minority Language Recognition, Political Trust, and Ethnic Demands

“…The argument that the MLR only corresponds to symbolic gestures in authoritarian contexts, with no substantial benefits to minority individuals, conflict with our expectations of immediate positive effects of the MLR on minority individuals' daily experiences of these state services. On the other hand, we agree with Kao et al (2022)'s broader argument that it might be more difficult to shift attitudes in a positive direction in authoritarian countries. Processes of autocratization and repression trigger increased threat perception among minority individuals and polarize political attitudes (Laebens & Öztürk, 2021;Nugent, 2020).…”

“…Most importantly, it confirms that the effects of minority language recognition depends on the context and can be paradoxical, as Kao et al (2022) has argued. Our paper also contributes to the explanations of the failure of the "peace process" in Turkey, initiated during the last decade, and it lets us to better understand the dilemma of policy-making on ethnic issues in conflictual and authoritarian settings.…”

“…Our paper contributes to both the comparative politics literature on the MLR and political trust (Kao et al, 2022) and the political psychology literature on the minority language use and ethnic salience (e,g., Darr et al, 2020;E. O. Pérez & Tavits, 2019).…”

“…• Hypothesis 2a: The use of the minority language in state services increases minority individuals' trust in national political institutions. Importantly, however, Kao et al (2022) have recently argued that the effects of the MLR can be moderated by the regime type. These authors introduce a distinction between states' symbolic gestures towards minority individuals and substantive concessions.…”

“…While the normative literature on language policies is rich, the empirical literature stays limited (Medeiros et al, 2020). 1 Furthermore, existing works exploring individual-level effects of the MLR relies entirely on observational data (see, for example, Kao et al, 2022;Liu et al, 2015;Safran & Liu, 2012). While these works have made an immense contribution to theory building in this field, their causal claims need to be tested with studies using experimental designs.…”