The paper analyses the impact of local demography on the electoral strategies of ethnic political parties. We focus on Hungarian parties in Slovakia and their tactics of fielding candidates in the 2014 and 2018 mayoral elections in 4,461 municipalities with competitive elections. We find that local demography is an essential explanatory factor concerning the strategies of ethnic parties. Our results show that in towns where an ethnic minority predominates, ethnic parties are more likely to challenge each other in elections. On the other hand, we find only little support for the split demography hypothesis that ethnic parties will cooperate in such an environment. Although Hungarian parties form alliances in these municipalities, their occurrence is not different than in towns where the same ethnic group dominates the local population. Finally, we observe that in areas where Hungarians are a numerical minority, inter-ethnic alliances are formed, but only by the more moderate ethnic party. In general, the paper shows that the ethnic composition of municipalities can provide incentives to avoid ethnic outbidding as well as to enhance intra-ethnic rivalry.

中文翻译：

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冲突与合作之间：少数民族政党的选举策略

本文分析了当地人口结构对少数民族政党选举策略的影响。我们重点关注斯洛伐克的匈牙利政党及其在 2014 年和 2018 年 4,461 个市镇市长选举中派出候选人的策略。我们发现当地人口统计是民族政党策略的一个重要解释因素。我们的研究结果表明，在少数民族占主导地位的城镇中，少数民族政党更有可能在选举中相互挑战。另一方面，我们发现，关于种族政党会在这种环境下合作的人口分裂假说几乎没有得到支持。尽管匈牙利政党在这些城市结成联盟，但它们的出现与同一民族在当地人口占主导地位的城镇没有什么不同。最后，我们观察到，在匈牙利人占少数的地区，形成了种族间联盟，但只是由较为温和的种族政党组成。总体而言，本文表明，城市的种族构成可以提供激励措施，以避免种族出价过高并加强族裔内部的竞争。