What Do We Know about Ethnic Outbidding? We Need to Take Ideology Seriously

Abstract

The term “ethnic outbidding” refers to an auction-like process where ethnically-based political parties adopt extreme ideological positions as a means of distancing themselves from rival parties. While a lot of research references ethnic outbidding, very little empirical analysis actually assesses the ability of the outbidding model to explain the actions of ethnic political parties. More generally, existing research on outbidding fails to account for ideological variation among ethnic parties. In this article, we review the research on ethnic party tactics and propose a strategy for implementing ideological data into future ethnic politics research. Employing local-level voting data for Romania and Slovakia, we show that ideological variables have a significant degree of explanatory power. This finding implies that it is only by treating ethnic party ideologies and tactics as exogenous independent variables that we can properly assess the validity of the outbidding model and the existence of outbidding.