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Ethnicization or de-ethnicization? Hungarian political representation in the Romanian parliament

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Tibor Toró Open the ORCID record for Tibor Toró [Opens in a new window]
Tibor Toró*
Affiliation:
European Studies Department, Sapientia – Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Email: torotibor@sapientia.ro
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Abstract

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The main goal of the paper is to understand how substantive representation of minorities works through ethnic parties and what the relationship between substantive and descriptive representation is in this specific case. Focus on the traditional understanding of substantive representation is common when analyzing the representation of minorities and marginalized groups, but only a few studies look at the substantive representation of national minorities from a constructivist approach, and even fewer are centered on Central and Eastern Europe. The paper argues that besides ethnicizing their demands, representatives of minorities have a wide array of strategies to achieve their goals. Using the parliamentary representation of Hungarians in Romania as a case study, I show that the strategies chosen in ethnic claims-making are context-dependent: ethnicizing messages are used only in specific cases, while de-ethnicization is applied in debates thought to be important for their community. These are part of a bargaining process that help representatives to achieve their goals. Thus, the paper broadens the debate on substantive representation and has implications in coding, as most of the studies addressing the issue assume that descriptive representatives, in order to provide substantive representation, must ethnicize their demands.

Keywords

descriptive representationsubstantive representationethnic partiesminoritiesHungarians in Romania
Type
Special Section: Representation of minorities: perspectives and challenges Guest Editors: Licia Cianetti and Jelena Lončar
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , March 2018 , pp. 219 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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