Introducing a Minority Institutions Database at a Time of Increasing Nationalism, Migration, and Conflict

Large numbers of people around the world live as persistent ethnic minorities in states where dominant groups pursue majoritarian nation-building. In such environments, members of minority populations pursuing distinct cultural, linguistic, religious, or other interests do so from a structurally disadvantaged position as they navigate majoritarian institutions in the design of which they have little say. Global migration induced by conflicts, environmental changes, and economic crises is likely to make this “minority condition” even more prevalent. Presently, we have insufficient comparative knowledge about how members of persistent minority populations fare in such environments and how they pursue various forms of agency (individually and collectively) to improve their lives. Although a rich body of theoretical and empirical scholarship has explored the tensions between majoritarian nation-building and ethnic minority populations, there is a lack of a minority-centered comparative understanding of who minority actors are, what common goals they are after, and how they pursue them. We introduce a novel comparative database about ethnic minority life encompassing individual- and group-level indicators of institutional access, participation, and agency across various public domains. We present data on six minorities from five majoritarian Central and Eastern European states, but the database is designed to accommodate comparative data about minorities in other regions.