Pride and Prejudice A comparative case study on party response to LGBT-rights in Serbia and Croatia

Abstract

Substantial research has been devoted to the party systems in Eastern Europe since the demise of the communism, concerning how political parties respond to liberal reform and what competitive patterns it produce. The dominant explanations have been revolving around theories on ‘communist regime types’, explaining the agency of political parties as a product of the structural legacy. Recent empirical findings reveal that political structures in Eastern Europe admit to far higher variation, and argue that federal structures together with ethnic minority relations have informed political competition. This case study builds on the latter argument and researches the ideological formation in Serbia and Croatia by examining how political parties respond to LGBT-rights. The study has an explanatory design and proposes that party response to LGBT-rights has been framed by preceding conflict over ethnic minority rights. The empirical material has been collected during two months in the field and builds on in-depth interviews with representatives of minority rights organizations and political parties. The material has been collected to understand how ethnic relations affected the ideological formation and how it is associated with the framing of LGBTrights. The findings suggest that party response to LGBT-rights is stipulated by a strong ethnic norm, being a product of ethnic nationalism and a conservative turn following the disintegration of ex-Yugoslavia. The study proposes that the extent to which political parties are affiliated to this norm is the major ideological distinction in capacity of explaining different reactions to LGBT-rights.