Beyond Autonomous Regions: Measuring Communal Self-Governance

Agnes Katalin Koos^1*Kenneth Keulman²

• ¹University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, United States
• ²Loyola University New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

The most venerable cross-national measure of inter-group political inequality, brought about by the Ethnic Power Relations project, relies on group representation in national governments, and assesses the power of groups to co-determine the country's future. Yet types of autonomies are also important factors of power relations, they substantiate the minorities' ability to self-govern. Territorially concentrated communal groups typically fight for territorial autonomies (TAs), while urban and dispersed minorities want non-territorial autonomies (NTAs), such as ethno-cultural selfgovernments. There is little quantitative data on NTAs, but their contribution to more peaceful inter-group relations is rarely challenged. The opposite is true about TAs. Majority groups in nation-states are reluctant to allow for these, and scientific evidence thus far has not supported their usefulness to mitigate inter-ethnic tensions and curb secessionist tendencies. It seems that empirical studies of TAs face some confounding factors that prevent clear-cut conclusions. First of all, regionally based minorities are more frequent in developing countries, which are less peaceful. The quality of autonomy and its overlapping with other cleavages, such as an urban-rural divide, are also factors that may make the difference. This paper explores a different confounding factor, the possibility that some minority groups enjoy de facto regional autonomy without nominal TA-s in place. This may happen when the country's administrative units are drawn around the ethnic/religious/linguistic settlement areas, and those administrative units also benefit from meaningful autonomy. An index constructed with the help of the QGIS software spatial join functions, which allowed to quantify the degree of overlap between the regional minorities' settlement areas and the ADM01 units (https://gadm.org/), shows that minority self-government has, indeed, the same pacifying effect as other measures of political equality and minority protective policies. The paper also explores some comparisons of regional minorities and regional majorities, and the relationship between nationalism and administrative policies.