Playing their cards right: ethnic parties and government coalitions in Post-Communist Europe

This article seeks to identify the determinants of ethnic parties’ access to coalition governments in Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia between 1990 and 2013. We conduct a cross-national and longitudinal analysis in which we take into account all the elections in which the ethnic parties gained parliamentary representation. With 21 cases over two decades – with the party at the election being the unit of analysis – and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) as the method of analysis, this study concludes that the pivotal position is important for access to government coalitions, while organizational change and government incumbency have a limited explanatory power