Linking active and activist citizens: electoral change and the Bosnian plenums

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article will examine whether the demands for social justice during the citizen-led assemblies (“plenums”) in February 2014 in Bosnia–Herzegovina (BiH) triggered electoral change in cantonal elections in the Bosniak–Croat entity (the Federation of BiH, or FBiH). Extant analyses underline the perennial weakness of Bosnian civil society, and the stasis in the ethnified political party system, even in the wake of the protests in 2014. However, these studies only look at the aggregate level and do not differentiate between places where plenums were established and those where they were not. To address this gap, the present article will differentiate, following Engin Isin, between “active citizenship” and “activist citizenship” as the basis for the conceptual framework. A difference-in-differences analysis will be employed using municipal-level FBiH cantonal election results from 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018. There are two main questions in the study. First, was there a significant electoral change in municipalities with plenums compared with places without a plenum? Relatedly, did the change differ amongst the main parties? The article will thus link active and activist citizenship in the post-conflict and post-socialist setting of BiH.