Politique comparée

B14(a) - Minorities and the State

Date: May 31 | Heure: 03:45pm to 05:15pm | Location: Classroom - CL 305 Room ID:15717

Chair/Président/Présidente : Emily Regan Wills (University of Ottawa)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Emily Regan Wills (University of Ottawa)

The State and Immigrant Civil Society: Sara Pavan (University of British Columbia)
Abstract: Does the state help or hinder civil society? The analysis of immigrant civil society can shed a new light on this longstanding question. Immigrants do not have a long history in their adopted countries. As a result, variation in their levels of civic activism cannot be accounted for by the historically stable, structural forces which Putnam theorizes about. However, if state institutions matter, it remains theoretically undetermined whether their effect is positive (leading to increased civic engagement) or negative (crowding out grassroots organizing). This paper examines these two competing predictions by comparing the Greater Toronto Area, in which the state funds civil society organizations to provide social services to immigrants, and the Santa Clara County, in which the state delegates the provision of social services to immigrants to civil society and the market. It relies on official data on registered civil society organizations as well as 15 semi-structured interviews with immigrant service providers. The findings show comparable levels of service oriented organizations in the two areas under study, suggesting that civil society can partially fill the void left by state inaction. However, expressive civil society in the Greater Toronto Area vastly outnumbers its counterpart in the Santa Clara County. This result holds true also for high-SES immigrant groups, signalling that internal resources might not entirely counteract the lack of state action. I conclude by discussing how the state affects these findings. My findings have implications for the quality of democratic governance in ethnically diverse societies.

Segregation, Inequality, and Public Goods: Evidence from Indian Slums: Jeremy Spater (Duke University)
Abstract: Ethnicity is increasingly invoked as a second dimension in distributive politics. However, despite a well-developed literature in sociology, the relationship between residential segregation and the salience of ascriptive divisions remain understudied in political science. One challenge is that extant measures of segregation are too geographically coarse and provide little insight into interpersonal contact. To address these issues, I to develop a novel segregation metric that can be applied at the level of individuals within a neighborhood. Using an original geocoded network census dataset, I confirm that this segregation metric captures social contact. I then apply this segregation metric to an original, large-n survey from urban slums in three Indian cities to test whether individual residential segregation is associated with outgroup hostility and political preferences, and whether this relationship is magnified by intergroup inequality. These results have implications for policies addressing inequality and urban design.

Institutional Capital and Minority Political Agency: Lessons from Post-communist Europe: Zsuzsa Csergő (Queen's University)
Abstract: Although the general significance of political agency in democratic society is widely acknowledged, the role of *minority political agency* is less well-understood. This paper addresses the question of how ethno-cultural minorities construct peacefully sustainable forms of democratic agency in states that discourage collective minority political action. The comparative analysis focuses on six ethno-linguistic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe: Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia; Poles in Lithuania; and Russophones in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. These minorities live in centralized states that have been EU members for over a decade, with borders that have shifted back-and-forth within the lifetime of three recent generations; and they have activist kin-states in the region. Against that backdrop, the very idea of minority political agency can be suspect. These minorities have challenged majoritarian strategies of nation-building peacefully (with only isolated instances of violence) since the beginning of the 1990s, but the effectiveness of minority claims-making has varied significantly across the region. The argument emerging from the analysis -- which employs process tracing and Qualitative Comparative Analysis of data I collected between 2009-2017 -- is that peaceful and effective minority political agency requires strength in institutional capital, including political institutions as well as a density of intermediary institutions. The analysis highlights the comparative advantages of minorities with inherited institutions; and the challenges faced by minorities that had to learn how to be minorities after 1991.“Newer” minorities, however, also engage in the construction of institutional capital; and institutions can also become important sites of intra-minority democratiic contestation.