11. Ethnic Data Collection: The Case of the Civil Service in Eastern Europe
- Author:
- Oleh Protsyk and Konstantin Sachariew
- Publication Date:
- 02-2008
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI)
- Abstract:
- Representative bureaucracies are an important indicator of ethnically inclusive societies. Minority group support for the policies and institutions of a state is often directly linked to the extent to which these groups are being represented, not only in politics but also in the state apparatus. A bureaucracy that reflects the cultural and ethnic diversity of the population is also likely to be more responsive to the needs and aspirations of minority groups in multiethnic societies. A substantial body of academic research in this area suggests that there is significant empirical support for this responsiveness thesis. The normative appeal of the representative bureaucracy concept has yet to be translated across most of Eastern Europe into specific policies designed to make the actual practice of civil service recruitment and promotion more open to minorities. In fact, what is often found by ECMI and other organizations working on various aspects of minority participation in public life is a lack of even basic systematic data on levels of minority inclusion. The lack of this type of data is often attributed to national legal provisions regulating personal data collection. In particular, ECMI research on minorities in public bureaucracy was hindered by the existence of numerous limitations on possibilities for collecting primary data or on obtaining access to the data already available. A similar problem has arisen in relation to ECMI research on socioeconomic exclusion of minorities, for which it has been difficult to obtain minority-related data on employment, education and health services. This paper begins by outlining the importance of minority civil service inclusion in the general discussion of minority participation in public life, so as to demonstrate the salience of the issue in recent academic and policy discussions of minority issues in the European context. It then turns to an analysis of how legal norms and policies in the areof bureaucratic recruitment and promotion affect the availability of data on minority representation in civil service. Finally, this paper will discuss the options and strategies available to the researcher in situations of limited availability/poor quality of official data. It briefly examines the utility of approaches such as the analysis of employment rosters using algorithms based on last names, snowball sampling techniques, interviewing, and requesting data from ethnic minority organizations.
- Topic:
- Civil Society, Ethnicity, Bureaucracy, Data, and Civil Servants
- Political Geography:
- Europe