Securing political representation of ethnic minorities is pivotal for stability of multiethnic societies, preventing ethnicity-based conflict, and minimising the effects of minorities’ kin-states intervention in domestic politics. While presence of minority representatives and their parties in the legislature help amplifying their group interests, it can also lead to the backlash from majroty representatives. Cianetti refers to this outcome as “presence polarisation dilemma” (2019): visibility of ethnic minority parties polarizes inter-ethnic political spectrum and encourages majority parties to sideline non-majority their interests in policy making and during government formation.

Latvia and Estonia two ethnically divided societies with considerable numbers of Russian-speaking voters will have /recently held parliamentary elections (October 2022 & March 2023 respectively). In the past, majority political parties in both countries performed well when they promised to ‘rescue the nation from the grasp of an alien, imposed, and illegitimate communist [and Russian] regime” (Darden and Grzymala-Busse 2006, 89). This rhetoric has become more pertinent since the beginning of war in Ukraine. Additionally, minorities use of languages other than state language has been instrumental in channleing public debates and political agendas on access to education and media, as well as loyalty of minorities to their state of residence and democracy at large.

In our paper we explore the usefulness of “presence polarisation dilemma” in explaining the marginalisation of minority-friendly parties in the run up and after the partliamentary election in these two ethnically divided societies in the context of the military agreession waged by a neighbouring, putative kin state of minorities on Ukraine. Reviewing party manifestos, statements by parties leaders and policy proposals on minority relevant concerns, we identify the 2022/23 elections as new turning point for states to exort greater nationalising societal cohesion over their ethnic minrotiy populations.

According to the classical definition of political culture, it is composed of the cognitions, affects and evaluations of society towards a political system (Almond, Verba, 1989). This set of attitudes derives from the level of the individual but it is considered as a group-oriented phenomenon (Varga, 1997). Due to this important characteristic, political culture as such may be analyzed at the level of society of a nation as well as at the level of a given group of it. The European Union has been described as a sui generis cooperation, however today there is consensus on the fact that the EU is a hybrid governance system without a government (Pollack, 2010, 35; Moravcsik, 2002) based on the pluralism of elites (Coen, 2007, 335). As it is underlined by Hix, the EU satisfies each requirement of a political system (2011, pp. 433-434). The existence of a political system on its own necessitates a political culture as well. Since in European decision-making the elites are the key players, it is necessary to analyze their behaviors and cultures at the European level. The political culture of the EU can be described as a depoliticized consensus-oriented or consensual one, due to its ideological foundations rooted in neofunctionalism, the Luxembourg compromise and its lack of legitimacy. However, the crises of the last 15 years (the euro crisis, the refugee crisis, the Brexit, the COVID and the Ukrainian-Russian war) make the political answers unavoidable which bring us towards the politicization of the EU and changes in its political culture. Phenomenons, like harsh political clashes, wide use of vetoes, and strong conflictual actions and reactions have become, if not usual, but not surprising in EU politics. Although the EU political status quo has not been changed, new actors, like smaller states seeked to rule or alter the agenda.

This paper seeks to describe the origins, the features and the future tendencies in this political culture using qualitative methods. It explores whether there exists a European political culture which is distinct from the national ones on the level of the elites, and if so, provides a description thereof, and finally presents the new tendencies due to the current challenges and issues.

Although “groupthink” was identified in the 1970s as a potential limitation to public policymaking, the tendency of groups to seek agreement at the expense of making rational decisions has still been little studied within public administrations. In relation to the European Union in particular, very little literature analyses how this cognitive bias affects EU institutions, and to the knowledge of this author there is no study of how groupthink operates within the European Commission. This article aims to fill that gap, by carrying out a systematic assessment of the extent and characteristics of this bias among European Commission officials, based on a series of interviews in Brussels, and building on a bounded rationality framework. Results show that groupthink affects decision-making within the European Commission, but the extent of the problem varies depending on the policy area.