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Ethnicity and Institutional Reform: The Dynamics of “Indigenization” in the Moldovan ASSR*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Charles King
Charles King*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, USA
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Extract

Since the early 1980s, the study of political institutions has made a remarkable come-back within political science. After a long period of concentrating on the “outputs” of the political process, many political scientists have begun to give greater attention to the formal and informal structures that circumscribe political behavior: governmental departments, ministries, standard operating procedures, social norms, duties, obligations. Especially in its more inductive, interpretive forms, contemporary institutional analysis has focused less on political outcomes and more on the political process itself—the “how” questions of politics rather than the “why” questions addressed both by highly quantitative methods and by deductive, rational choice approaches. One legacy of the behavioral revolution has been a propensity for researchers to see the elucidation of why some groups win out over others in the political process as the chief end of political science. But by examining the strategic boundaries within which action takes place, modern institutional analysis—labelled the “new institutionalism” as early as 1984—seeks to remind political scientists that, quite simply, institutions matter.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 1998 , pp. 57 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

* Many thanks to Don Dyer, Michael Hamm, Stuart Kaufmann, Pal Kolsto and Wim van Meurs for their suggestions on this article. The assistance of the staff at the Archive of Social–Political Organizations of the Republic of Moldova is gratefully acknowledged.Google Scholar

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28. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 2401, ll. 55–58.Google Scholar

29. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 2401, l. 6.Google Scholar

30. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 2401, l. 8; d. 3364, l. 7.Google Scholar

31. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 1022, l. 4; d. 1890, l. 78.Google Scholar

32. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 2401, l. 5; d. 2181, ll. 18–20.Google Scholar

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35. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 2017, l. 33; d. 2401, l. 8.Google Scholar

36. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 1162, l. 4.Google Scholar

37. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 2017, l. 33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 2017, l. 48.Google Scholar

39. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 2017, ll. 27–28.Google Scholar

40. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 2017, l. 32.Google Scholar

41. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 2017, ll. 35–36, 44, 48.Google Scholar

42. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 1022, l. 1.Google Scholar

43. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 1556, l. 18.Google Scholar

44. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 1022, l. 1; d. 1890, l. 95; d. 2401, l. 14.Google Scholar

45. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 3997, l. 100.Google Scholar

46. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 3997, ll. 93–94, 122–125.Google Scholar

47. Moldovans formed the largest ethnic group in only four of the MASSR's 14 raions (Grigoriopol'skii, Dubossarskii, Slobodzeiskii, Chernianskii), and the second-largest group (after Ukrainians) in seven others (Anan'evskii, Valegotsulovskii, Kamenskii, Kodymskii, Kotovskii, Oknianskii, Rybnitskii).Google Scholar

48. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 1022, l. 1.Google Scholar

49. These ankety are located in AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 9, ll. 1–261; d. 85, ll. 1–263; d. 1896, ll. 1–164; d. 1897, ll. 1–70; d. 3623, ll. 1–280. Information has been analyzed for nearly all the delegates to each conference, with the exception of the 7th, where only 233 of a possible 362 ankety seem to have survived.Google Scholar

50. A small number of delegates gave ambiguous answers which were impossible to code. Although the form of the ankety changed from year to year, most merely asked “Do you know Moldovan?” No distinction has been made here between those delegates who indicated their level of proficiency (e.g., “plokho,” “slabo,” etc.).Google Scholar

51. The last three years of the period 1925–1932, in fact, saw the largest in-take of Moldovans, when they accounted for one-quarter or more of all new party members. Lazo, E. S., Moldavskaia partiinaia organizatsiia v gody stroitel'stva sotsializma (1924–1940) (Chişinău: Stiinta, 1981), p. 26.Google Scholar

52. Liber, , “Korenizatsiia,” pp. 20–21.Google Scholar