Explaining the Success of Nationalist Parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

One of the key questions of Bosnia and Herzegovina's political community, raised afresh after every multiparty election since 1990, could be stated as follows: "How come a majority of the electorate keeps voting for the political parties that use a markedly nationalist rhetoric?"The experience with "national" parties, or more accurately the ethnopolitical experience of the past two decades, which in its most radical form has proved to be so destructive for Bosnia and Herzegovina's political community, be it through the atrocities and ravages of war or through more or less subtle forms of discriminatory practice, justifies us in rephrasing the question thus: "How come a majority of the electorate keeps choosing the worst political option?"The fact is that from 1990 to 2006, despite their open and often widely expressed contempt for the ethnopolitical elites and, which is particularly interesting, "their own" ethnopolitical elites at that, once in the privacy of the voting booths on election day, the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina still diligently put a cross beside the name of "their" national leaders.Why is this?We will be so bold as to claim that if there is a consensus about anything at all in this country, there is a general consensus that we all know there will be absolutely no change at all.And yet, at the very next elections the same voters will hasten to the polling station to give their votes to "their" people.The authors inquire into the possible answer to this question following the model of the Prisoner's Dilemma, or the Dilemma of Ethnopolitical Prisoner.

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