Beyond binary: A new measure of party ethnicization
2025-09-04
In contrast to existing binary conceptualizations of ethnic parties, which often depend on arbitrary thresholds and/or expert judgments, we propose a survey-based continuous scale to measure the extent to which a party receives balanced or unbalanced support from a country’s ethnic groups. We present a dataset of ethnicization scores for 409 parties across 24 countries and use examples from Slovak, Israeli, and American political parties to illustrate the utility of our measure. Our proposed method is straightforward to implement and will be valuable for a wide range of future research on ethnic politics.