Nationality laws were passed in societies that felt threatened by these minorities' aspirations of integration and demands for equality, resulting in regimes that turned xenophobia into major tropes.
[4] Research shows that several spheres of control are vital for ethnocratic regimes, including of the armed forces, police, land administration, immigration and economic development.
These powerful government instruments may ensure domination by the leading ethnic groups and the stratification of society into 'ethnoclasses' (exacerbated by 20th century capitalism's typically neo-liberal policies).
However, they tend to become unstable in the longer term, suffering from repeated conflict and crisis, which are resolved by either substantive democratization, partition, or regime devolution into consociational arrangements.
Ethnocracy can also be a political regime instituted on the basis of qualified rights to citizenship, with ethnic affiliation (defined in terms of race, descent, religion, or language) as the distinguishing principle.
[8] Generally, the raison d'être of an ethnocratic government is to secure the most important instruments of state power in the hands of a specific ethnic collectivity.
[citation needed] Ethnocracies are characterized by their control system – the legal, institutional, and physical instruments of power deemed necessary to secure ethnic dominance.
[citation needed] Israel has been labeled an ethnocracy by scholars such as Alexandre Kedar,[13] Shlomo Sand,[14] Oren Yiftachel,[15] Asaad Ghanem,[16][17] Haim Yakobi,[18] Nur Masalha[19] and Hannah Naveh.
Smooha in particular argues that ethnocratic democracies, allowing a privileged status to a dominant ethnic majority while ensuring that all individuals have equal rights, are defensible.
[30] British researcher Neil Melvin concludes that Estonia is moving towards a genuinely pluralist democratic society through its liberalization of citizenship and active drawing of leaders of the Russian settler communities into the political process.
[36] In 2024, The New York Times noted that critics contended that members of the Tutsi ethnic group "dominate[d] the top echelons" of Rwanda's government under Kagame, thereby excluding Hutus and their 85% of the country's population.
[39] Azgın points to government policies whose goals are the "exclusion, marginalization, or assimilation" of minority groups that are non-Turkish as the defining elements of Turkish ethnocracy.
In his 1985 book Power-Sharing in South Africa,[42] Arend Lijphart classified contemporaneous constitutional proposals to address the resulting conflict into four categories: These illustrate the idea that state power can be distributed along two dimensions: legal-institutional and territorial.
On the territorial dimension are the unitary state, "intermediate restructuring" (within one formal sovereignty), and partition (creating separate political entities).