Does Familiarity Breed Contempt? Inter-Ethnic Contact and Support for Illiberal Parties

Does contact between ethnic groups lead to greater support for liberal parties? Research on this debate in the US context is contaminated by high levels of mobility and a truncated party palette. This paper addresses the problem through a detailed examination of the 1929 and 1935 national parliamentary elections in Czechoslovakia, where mobility was relatively limited, the spectrum of parties was broad, and the ethnic groups were numerous. We employ ecological inference techniques on an original database of election and census results to estimate Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and German support for liberal, fascist, nationalist, populist, and communist parties across a variety of local ethnic demographic configurations. The results show that on its own, inter-ethnic contact has indeterminate electoral effects: no uniform pattern of support for liberal parties exists either across or within ethnic groups. Contrary to expectation, this finding holds under both ethnically cooperative and conflictual national political environments. We surmise that this electoral behavior may be rooted as much in national demography and party organization as in the constraints posed by the local demographic context.