Ethnic or multi-ethnic parties? Party competition and legislative recruitment in Moldova
Publisher: ECMI Volume: 22 pages, pdf Description: This paper attributes the lack of minority party institutionalization in the Moldovan case to the success of political entrepreneurs engaged in constructing political organizations capable of winning multi-ethnic support. These entrepreneurs have drawn on the resources and legacies of the Soviet period in order to compete successfully for societal support in a new democratic environment and in a new country where approximately 24% of the citizens found themselves belonging to an ethnic minority population. In addition to having invested in the development of programmatic profiles attractive to multi-ethnic constituencies, they effectively implemented recruitment policies intended to build genuinely multi-ethnic political organizations.