Ethnic Parties and Their Candidates Matter

Abstract

This chapter argues that ethnic parties are a type of niche party, while highlighting the political relevance of ethnic parties and providing data on ethnic parties that compete in legislative elections around the world (in Asia, Canada and Western Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa). The chapter then explains how the extant literature on ethnic parties is limited because it ignores the behavior of individual candidates campaigning in their districts. A review of the literature on party behavior shows how individual campaign strategies connect with those goals. The chapter concludes by discussing the innovative methodologies this book uses to demonstrate how individual candidates matter in elections; the text also provides an overview of how the rest of the book advances the view that niche parties are similar to other parties in their behavior, largely because they are constrained by the strategies that individual candidates adopt.