Project Description
Minority Institutions Database (MID) provides publicly accessible data about organizational activities of ethnic minority communities living in countries of Central and Eastern Europe. These include Poles in Lithuania; Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia, and Russian speakers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The research is supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellowship. The larger research agenda aims to explore sources and forms of minority political agency in Central and Eastern Europe.
The MID contributes to our understanding of the institutional capital of ethnic minorities by:
- Mapping institutional capital of ethnic minorities across an broad spectrum of societal domains
- Presenting standardized measures that facilitate comparative research of minority institutional capital
- Complementing existing research on civil society by focusing on the agency of ethnic minorities within larger societies
Mission
The mission of this Database is to share research-based knowledge about the institutional life of ethnic minority populations living in majoritarian states. Scholars, practitioners, and minority organizations are the primary audiences of this index. Most MID data is freely accessible and available for download in various formats.
Further, it is the mission of the Database to make its digital data accessible to minority communities that assisted in making it. The Database provides formatted tables, charts and visuals addressing various facets of minority institutions to make this data self-explanatory and easy to use for non-academic audiences.
The MID also serves as an open access data repository intended to preserve existing digital data and all future additions. This entails storing and reliably updating data on minority institutions.