Professor Rovny, you had the opportunity to visit the EUI for a week. Could you tell us about what motivated you to visit this institution and the activities you carried out during your stay?
The interest in coming to the EUI is the academic environment, which is quite exceptional. This place collects some of the brightest minds of Europe and beyond, and simply interacting with colleagues and students, spending time to discuss and meet, and seeing what they're working on has been great.
More formally, I have discussed some of the works that students had sent me in advance. I was able to read them and comment on them. I also gave a talk combining a recently published book with some projects that I'm starting from the book. It was very valuable to receive the feedback of a very large and very engaged audience.
Last, but definitely not least, I have a number of papers that I'm working on together with Professor Filip Kostelka. We have managed to move one of our papers closer to a submittable form.
As you mentioned, you gave a lecture at the EUI examining the relationship between ethnic minorities and democracy. Can you delve deeper into how different aspects of democracy, such as liberal democracy or social rights, resonate uniquely with various minority groups?
The core argument of the talk, which stems out of my book, is that ethnic minorities have a general interest in liberal democratic arrangements while they're in a democracy.
In a democracy, ethnic politics, contrary to expectations, are actually going to potentially be a force for maintaining democracy, which I've studied in Eastern Europe. I've demonstrated how this has been quite important in a number of countries during democratic transition in the 1990s, but also during recent episodes of democratic backsliding when some of the minority elites and parties have attempted in various ways to slow it down.
This is based on the idea that, conditionally, ethnic minorities seek to protect themselves through counter-majoritarian aspects of democracy, particularly through the protection of civil rights and liberties, which is a non-majoritarian component of democracy. Simultaneously, they're not necessarily so sure about the utility of majoritarian components of democracy, such as electoral democracy or direct popular democracy.
My current research is trying to engage with this and see whether ethnic minorities are interested in some components of democracy, being counter-majoritarianism more so than others, such as electoral democracy. That's what the preliminary results show.
Could you provide examples of how these minorities try to protect themselves from majoritarian rule?
My book delves into the cases of Hungarians in Slovakia or ethnic Russians in Estonia.
One example is when quite a liberal ethnic minority party in Slovakia joined in a very difficult coalition with a populist illiberal party in 2016, which was to some degree seen as a bit of a betrayal by their voters because they went into this coalition with a prime minister who was not particularly minority-friendly or liberal democracy-friendly. But in that government, they very much sought to control some of the key portfolios that would protect them as a minority. They were always interested in questions of usage of language, language education, and signage in national languages.
They were also interested in the ministry of regional development, but most importantly, they actually did manage to obtain the position of the minister of justice. The minister of justice was able to put into place a set of new laws that contained aspects like transparency of government contracts that importantly constrained some of the corrupt and anti-democratic practices that the government was involved in.
In Estonia there was a similar situation, where a party that was not explicitly an ethnic minority party ―but that has historically been supported and has itself supported ethnic minorities― also went into a difficult coalition with a radical right party. That party was not happy with it and the Russian representatives didn't like it.
Some of them deliberately didn't take up their seats in parliament in order not to vote for that coalition. I've interviewed specific individuals who preferred to stay in the city hall and work in local politics, even though they had a seat in the parliament. It was a symbolic rejection: “I will not vote for this coalition, but I will not prevent my party from doing it.”
There was a very instrumental aim that the party had in mind, and that was to protect Russian education. They said, “we will go dance with the devil, but one red line is Russian schools will remain.” They saw that if they weren’t going in the coalition, the majority influenced by the radical right party will undermine this fundamental need for them and their community. Throughout that government, they have managed to protect Russian schooling.
You have also shared that you have a project coming shortly. Could you zoom in on that?
We are working on a set of projects that are related to the question of how citizens decide in presidential elections, which we know actually very little about. There's a lot of study in the United States, but not so in Europe, perhaps with the exception of France. Yet, it turns out that about two-thirds of European countries are semi-presidential systems, so presidents are directly elected.
They might not play a central role in the executive functions of the government, but they do play important roles, often in constitutional matters, making key decisions about who gets to form coalitions or making appointments such as to courts of justice, for example. Their role is non-trivial and, importantly, these elections are generally hotly contested because who gets to become the president and symbolically represent the country is relevant, and we know very little about that.
We're running a series of surveys that consult experts about the ideological positioning and other characteristics of presidential candidates, and we've run an individual-level survey across five countries.
We study the influence of different types of characteristics that are both personal and ideological, but we are also interested in the moral character of individuals through questions that are straight out of real life: whether a candidate has been convicted of corruption, whether a candidate was involved in a past authoritarian regime, if the candidate is someone associated with the communist past in eastern Europe, etc., and thus seeing how these work in conjunction with each other. Indeed, we are specifically studying how morally problematic characters can actually be electable if they provide the right combination of policy and other positions.
How does the CIVICA alliance contribute to your research?
It made this possible. This was a unique opportunity to stay here for a week, which gave me much more flexibility to meet more people, get more feedback, and also give some comments to students. Without CIVICA this would have either not happened or would have been a lot shorter.
Jan Rovny is a professor of political science at the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po, Paris. His research concentrates on political competition in Europe with the aim of uncovering the political conflict lines in different countries. He explores the issues that political parties contest across the continent, the strategies that different parties follow, as well as the preferences and voting patterns of voters.
CIVICA brings together ten leading European higher education institutions in the social sciences, humanities, business management and public policy, with a total of 72,000 students and 13,000 faculty members. Together, they build on an ever-stronger combination of teaching research and innovation to mobilise and share knowledge as a public good and to facilitate civic responsibility in Europe and beyond.