To improve the validity of our comparative endeavors in ethno-politics, this piece re-examines the relationship between conceptual definitions, categories of classification used in large-N datasets, and thick description found through case studies. It does this through the lens of claims to autonomy by ethnic minorities, and in particular through a detailed comparative case study of what autonomy means as a programmatic goal for ethnic minority Hungarian elites in Romania and Slovakia. Three unexpected findings emerge which make the case for qualitative research to better inform the categories and variables used in large-N datasets (1) there is a weak relationship between the conceptual definitions of autonomy and the way it is coded in relevant datasets like the Minorities at Risk (MAR) dataset; (2) empirically, the Hungarian comparative case studies show that elites do not think of autonomy in the same way as the conceptual literature nor do their understandings of autonomy easily fit into the coding categories of datasets; (3) there is inconsistency across Hungarian minority elites in their own definitions of autonomy as well as the lack of distinctions between autonomy and other institutional arrangements. This raises issues of equivalence and ambiguity and I conclude with suggestions for better measurement.

In this article Pompila Burcică traces the work and legal conditions in which Hungarian theatre professionals – company directors and actors – operated as a national minority of middle-class status in Greater Romania after 1918. Their attempts at representing Hungarian culture in the public space, as revealed in their business correspondence with the Romanian state, placed theatre professionals not at the vanguard of a collective action on behalf of a minority and its cultural life, but at the forefront of civic engagement and individual private initiative that led to economic recovery and development, thus illustrating the array of civic choices and economic opportunities for minorities holding Romanian citizenship in a nation state. The article focuses on two issues: the work environment for minorities that helped them adjust professionally and negotiate and exert a civic identity in the new nation state; and the degree to which a cultural field such as theatre was actually treated as an economic entrerprise, free of political interference. These civic and economic concerns accounted for the success of these theatre entrepreneurs, operating their businesses under the control of a paternalistic state.