Ethnic politics Flashcards
Argues that race and ethnicity are the same. Race and ethnicity is inherently conflictual. We are unable to distinguish the intensity between Sunni-Shiite ethnic conflict and US racial tensions. Hence, race and ethnicity are one in the same. Skin color (usually the marker for race) is just more visible. However, racial tensions are just another form of ethnic conflict. Horowitz defines ethnicity as color, language, and religion, which includes tribes, nationalities, and race.
Horowitz, Donald. 1985. Ethnic Groups in Conflict.
Ethnic identity: A subset of identity categories in which eligibility for membership is determined by attributes associated with descent. Views that people within an ethnicity having a common ancestry or the myth of a common ancestry: i.e. based on descent rules, where we look at parents of individuals and trace backwards. However, she goes on to argue that ethnicity does not matter or has not been shown to matter for explaining most outcomes such as violence, democratic stability, and patronage. Her claim is that the role of descent around common ancestry because individuals often belong to different ethnic groups despite the fact of common ancestry. Additionally, groups that we commonly consider ethnic is due to a myth of common ancestry when rather, those identities are constructed. As a result, Chandra is saying that the visible factors (ascriptive identity) should be the only way you identify groups and not otherwise.
Chandra, Kanchan. 2006. “What is Ethnic Identity and Does it Matter?.” Annual Review of Political Science. 9: 397 - 424.
argue that ethnic identity is based on self-identification and can come in the form of skin color, language, religion, and background. In response to Chandra’s emphasis on ascriptive identity (the way others view you), they argue that people identify themselves in a certain way and common myth of ancestry and ancestry itself cannot be eliminated nor discounted. They also argue that on the extreme end, there’s a qualitative difference between race and ethnicity. This is because racial tensions are really intense because the way certain races started off interact is extreme (i.e. slavery).
McLain, Paula D. et al. 2009. “Group Membership, Group Identity, and Group Consciousness: Measures of Racial Identity in American Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science. 12: 471 - 485.
argues that ethnic, linguistic, and religious heterogeneity is based on the quality of institutions and on growth. Building on Easterly and Levine (1997) that suggests that per capita GDP growth is inversely related to ethnolinguistic fractionalization in a large sample of countries, argues that Africa’s growth failure is due to ethnic conflict. They propose 3 new indices based on a broad measure of ethnicity, religion, and language using the Herfindahl Index. Of which, each index leads to substantially different results when tested to explain growth and government quality. While ethnic and linguistic fractionalization are associated with negative outcomes in quality of government, religious fractionalization is not.
Alesina, Alberto, et al. 2003. “Fractionalization.” Journal of Economic Growth. 8(2): 115 - 165.
argues that ELF is not a good measure because it is constructed from enumerations of ethnic groups that include all of the ethnographically distinct groups in a country irrespective of whether or not they engage in political competition whose effects on macroeconomic policymaking are being tested. Instead, Posner proposes a new measure for ethnic diversity: Politically Relevant Ethnic Groups (PREG). The PREG measure does a better job at accounting for policy-mediated effects of ethnic diversity of ethnic growth in Africa than does ELF. Posner points out that problems with ELF include (1) the data constructed by ELF is dubious from old ethnographic studies and groups remain static, (2) summarizing ethnic landscapes with a single statistic to apply to a universal index obscures features of ethnic diversity that may be highly relevant to the research question, and (3) there is a causal mismatch that links slow growth with diversity to test this mechanism. There’s a false assumption of exogeneity of ethnic historical events that causal ethnic fractionalization, dismissing the endogenous aspects apparent in Mauro (1995). ELF also has a data country grouping issue when some groups are categorized under an umbrella group when they should be autonomous. Posner’s study is not without flaws: (1) it is still endogenous to joint forces or other elements like colonialism, (2) just because some groups are not competing in the political sphere does not mean they are not politically relevant (i.e. Uighurs who have no political say but are definitely relevant). PREG as defined by Posner are groups that are competing at the political level.
Posner, Daniel. 2004. “Measuring Ethnic Fractionalization in Africa.” American Journal of Political Science. 48(4): 849 - 863.
analyzes the state as an institution that is captured to different degrees by representatives of particular ethnic communities, and thus conceive of ethnic wars as the result of competing ethnonationalist claims to state power. They compile an original dataset (Ethnic Power Relations datset - EPR) which covers politically relevant ethnic groups from 1946 to 2005. They find that conflict with the government is more likely to erupt when (1) the more representatives of an ethnic groups are excluded from state power, especially if they experienced a loss of power in the recent past, (2) the higher their mobilizational capacity is, and (3) the more they have experienced conflict in the past. They conclude that ethnonationalist struggles over access to state power are an important part of the dynamics leading to the outbreak of civil wars.
Cederman, Lars-Erik, Andreas Wimmer, and Brian Min. 2010. “Why do Ethnic Groups Rebel? New Data and Analysis.” World Politics. 62(1): 98 - 103.
argues that cross-cutting cleavages and measures are important for analyses of ethnic diversity. He proposes a measure of cross-cuttingness (captures how identically distributed groups on one cleavage are on a second or more cleavages), cross- fractionalization (a composite measure of subgroup fractionalization and cross-cuttingness), and subgroup fractionalization (a simple application of fractionalization to multidimensional subgroups) to present indices along combinations of five cleavages: race, language, religion, region, and income. He finds that cross-cuttingness and cross-fractionalization both increase the percentage growth in real GDP per capita, whereas subgroup fractionalization decreases it.
Selway, Joel Sawat. 2011. “The Measurement of Cross-Cutting Cleavages and Other Multidimensional Cleavage Structures.” Political Analysis. 19(1): 48 - 60.
compiles a new dataset - All Minorities at Risk (AMAR) - to construct a list of socially relevant ethnic groups. They find that a challenge lies in defining the appropriate level of aggregation for groups. To address this, they proceed to enumerate subgroups of commonly recognized groups. Socially relevant ethnic groups are socially relevant when people notice and condition their actions on ethnic distinctions in everyday life. Social relevance, in this case, does not refer to political mobilization or connotations, but only refers to the salience of the identity in guiding an individual’s actions in life. Members of socially relevant groups in AMAR are determined by (1) descent, (2) recognition as important by members or non members (importance may be psychological, normative, or strategic), (3) members share distinguishing cultural features such as language, religion, occupational niche, and customs, (4) one or more of these cultural features are either practiced by a majority of the group or preserved and studied by a set of members who are broadly respected by a winder membership, and (5) the group has at least 100,000 members or constitutes 1% of the population in a state.
Birnir, Johanna et al. 2015. “Socially Relevant Ethnic Groups, Ethnic Structure, and AMAR.” Journal of Peace Research. 52(1): 110 - 115.
propose that one means of measuring identity is through experimental induction of victimhood in terms of high-commitment levels to in-group or whether in-group members are portrayed as victims or not.
Sylvan, Donald A. and Amanda K. Metskas. 2009. “Trade-offs in Measuring Identities: A Comparison of Approaches.” In Abdelel et al., eds. Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
argue that the most important cumulative finding in ethnic politics can be attributed to the constructivist approach where ethnic identity is fluid, and endogenous to a set of social, economic, and political processes. In this approach, individuals have multiple identities. This contrasts with the primordialist approach of Geertz 1973 where individual identity is immutable once acquired. However, one major flaw of constructivism in ethnic politics is that it is unfalsifiable. If it confirms all identities as ethnic identities, then it says nothing about ethnic diversity that we are trying to study.
“Symposium: Cumulative Findings in the Study of Ethnic Politics.” APSA - CP. 12(1): 7 - 22.
argues that the construction of identity is a process through which the repertoire of political identities in society might be mobilized. He argues that the cleavage(s) in society that emerge as salient are the aggregation of all actors’ individual decisions about identity that will serve them the best. As a result, ethnic cleavages and the construction of ethnic identity, in his view, is based on elite action, formal institutional rules that govern political competition, and consociationalism. Since political institutions shape individual identity choices, individuals form groups to gain access to strategically allocated resources in political competition. This is an instrumental view of ethnic identity and construction. However, fails to identify under what circumstances individuals choose an identity over another. He assumes that individuals switch identities out of utility (fluid) without care for in-group loyalties. Furthermore, institutions, goods and services, and ethnic identity might be endogenous to each other. Lastly, while being in a minimum winning coalition of ethnic groups might garner access to opportunities for getting resources, it is unclear if those opportunities actually lead to getting goods.
Posner, Daniel. 2005. Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chapters 1 - 3.
Realistic group conflict theory: Intergroup conflict is based on perceptions of group members with regard to competition between groups for scarce resources.
Social identity theory: Resources scarcity is insufficient explanation for intergroup conflict. Mere formation of groups produces in-group favoritism versus out-group. Because social identity produces positive self-esteem, people tend to accentuate their in-group similarities as well as negatively evaluate differences from out-group members.
Discusses implications for political science: Group identities form in historically specific ways, then social representations which foment conflict are also specific to a particular society.
Monroe, Kristen Renwick, James Hankin, and Renee Bukovchik van Vechten. 2000. “The Psychological Foundations of Identity Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science. 3(1): 419 - 447.
takes ethnic categories to be socially constructed, but as remaining socially meaningful and politically consequential. He conducts an open-ended survey to allow both in-group and out-group members define how they view a particular group and proceeds to use computational text analysis to parse out identity dimensions. He points out that other studies subject identity construction to selection bias where studies may have focused on non-representative subgroups. Pepinsky, on the other hand, leaves his survey as open ended to avoid selection bias.
Pepinsky, Thomas B. 2017. “Discovering of Social Beliefs about Ethnic Structure from Survey Data.” Working Paper.
tests if human rights institutions can influence individual behavior as a perception to Roma identity as a minority and oppressed group is riddled with issues. She finds that the EU accession process, a top-down process, may not substantially reduce discrimination with a group and that a bottom-up process of NGO activities help to reduce discrimination. However, her study has two flaws: (1) selection bias as she chooses most-likely cases for her experiment sites, and (2) the study has yet to prove generalizability.
Bracic, Ana. 2016. “Reaching the Individual: EU Accession, NGOs, and Human Rights.” American Political Science Review. 110(3): 530 - 546.
argues that social mobility prospects and thus willingness to mobilize more directly correlate with not speaking a metropolitan language, a trait which leads to lower mobility prospects and thus increases an individual’s willingness to engage in ethnopolitical behavior (ethnic mobilization and conflict). Thus, he introduces a measure of ethnicity via linguistic proficiency in the metropolitan language of the state measured by the concentration of the population in a region that speaks the metropolitan language as their first or second languages fluently.
Marquardt, Kyle L. 2018. “Identity, Social Mobility, and Ethnic Mobilization: Language and the Disintegration of the Soviet Union.” Comparative Political Studies. 51(7): 831 - 867.
argues that candidate-centric rules offer electoral candidates incentives to politicize ethnicity. Additionally, he argues that party centric rules show that there is a decrease in the politicization of ethnicity. When candidates need personal votes, they are more likely to campaign on personal attributes, the constituency service, and local agendas, whereas in other situations they campaign on the party label and national issues.
Fox, Colm. 2018. “Candidate-Centric Systems and the Politicization of Ethnicity: Evidence from Indonesia.” Democratization.
presents a model explaining why under monopolistic conditions, Catholic clergy in Latin America ignored the religious and social needs of poor rural indigenous parishioners but, when confronted by the expansion of US portestantism, became major institutional proporters of rural indigenous causes. Trejo argues that a society’s religious market structure can explain whether religion is “the opinion of the people” or a major source of dissent secular mobilization. Catholic indigenous parishioners empowered by competition demanded the same benefits their protestant neighbors were receiving in terms of social services, ecclesiastical decentralization, and practicing religion in their own language. Un- able to decentralize ecclesiastic hierarchies, Catholic clergy moved into the secular realm to promote indigenous movements and ethnic identities. (Trejo takes a promordialist approach.)
Trejo, Guillermo. 2009. “Religious Competition and Ethnic Mobilization in Latin America: Why the Catholic Church Promotes Indigenous Movements in Mexico.” American Political Science Review. 103(3): 323 - 342.
“When politicians rely on ethnic solidarity with voters, they tend to create ethnic blocs. Yet politicians who enlist the help of local leaders may be able to access a far broader base of support.” In a weak electoral system with strong intermediaries, parties can more easily appeal across ethnic bounds. With strong intermediaries, ethnicity is not activated because of clientelistic relationships where exchanges between votes and resources are mobilized due to strongmen (individuals with resource and political clout within ethnic groups). One issue, however, is that Koter does not address the backgrounds of these intermediaries. The assumption here is that in a strongman intermediary system, the voter and the intermediary is at least of similar identity, but the intermediary does not have to be of the same ethnicity as the candidate. She presents examples in Senegal of this. So why do coethnic voters vote for their coethnics when there isn’t a strongman intermediary? Because voters think that values are shared simply based on ascriptive coethnic association. As a result, candidates activate coethnics because they know voters will vote along ethnic lines.
Koter, Dominika. 2013. “King Makers: Local Leaders and Ethnic Politics in Africa.” World Politics. 65(20): 187 - 232.
Vis-a-vis mechanisms of coalition and competition, argues that when ethnic minorities enter into government in a previous election, the subsequent election will result in a rise of a radical right party. The consequence of mobilization for the author is polarization in the political system.
Bustikova, Lenka. 2014. “Revenge of the Radical Right.” Comparative Political Studies. 47(12): 1738 - 1765.
argues that ethnic minority parties are less likely to be punished than their fellow coalition members for poor economic performance, due to benefits of a “captive” electorate. She leverages both national and subnational-level data and finds that ethnic minority parties gain votes after serving in government, while mainstream parties almost always lose. She also shows that while mainstream incumbents are punished or rewarded accordingly for changes in GDP growth, ethnic minority party vote shares remain stable. She posits that because ethnic voters are loyal voters that have been mobilized around a shared identity, ethnic minority parties are less likely to be punished for economic performance than their fellow incumbents.
Aha, Katharine. 2019. “Resilient Incumbents: Ethnic Minority Political Parties and Voter Accountability.” Party Politics. 1 - 12.
argues that an ethnic party is likely to succeed in a patronage- democracy when it has competitive rules for intraparty advancement and when the size of the ethnic group(s) it seeks to mobilize exceeds the threshold of winning or leverage imposed by the electoral system. Competitive rules of intraparty advancement give a party comparative advantage in representation of elites from its target ethnic category. The positive difference between the size of its target ethnic category and the threshold of winning or leverage indicates that the party has viable shot at victory or influence. Although it sounds like ethnic demography determines elections instead of democratic principles, the constructivist approach believes that ethnicity is malleable and open to competing political entrepreneurs to activate certain aspects of an individual’s identity.
Chandra, Kanchan. 2004. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chapters 1 - 2.
argues that ethnopopulist parties in Latin America have been among the most successful parties. He defines ethnopopulist partiees as inclusive ethnically-based parties that adopt classical populist electoral strategies. He claims that ethnopopulist parties have succeeded (and traditional ethnic parties have failed) in large part because of the nature of ethnicity and ethic relations in the region. Low levels of ethnic polarization and the ambiguity and fluidity of ethnic identification in the region have meant that indigenous- based parties can win votes not only from self-identified indigenous people but also from people from other ethnic categories who share some identification with indigenous cultures or who support the parties based on their positions on other issues.
Madrid, Raul. 2009. “The Rise of Ethnopopulism in Latin America.” World Politics. 60(3): 475 - 508.
argues that ethnic parties stabilize democracies in the short term. This is because democracy introduces uncertainty, especially in new democracies, as individuals do not know what policies they want and voters aren’t clear on party platforms. Consequently, voters vote according to ethnic group as a heuristic.
Birnir, Johanna K. 2007. “Divergence in Diversity? The Dissimilar Effects of Cleavages on Electoral Politics in New Democracies.” American Journal of Political Science. 51(3): 602 - 619.
present experimental results to help explain why ethnicity has a relatively minor role in Mali, an ethnically heterogenous sub- Saharan African country in which ethnic identity is a poor predictor of vote choice and parties do not form along ethnic lines. They argue that cross-cutting ties afforded by an informal institution called “cousinage” helps explain the weak association between ethnicity and individual choice. While they do find that individuals favor coethnics over politicians from a different ethnic group, cousinage alliances counteract the negative impact of ethnic differences in candidate evaluations.
Dunning, Thad and Lauren Harrison. 2010. “Cross-Cutting Cleavages and Ethnic Voting: An Experimental Study of Cousinage in Mali” American Political Science Review. 104(1): 21 - 39.
argues that the political salience of a cultural cleavage will depend on the sizes of the groups that it defines relative to the size of the arena in which political competition is taking place. If the cultural cleavage defines groups that are large enough to constitute viable coalitions in the competition for political power, then politicians will mobilize these groups and the cleavage that divides them will become politically salient. If the cleavages are not large enough to serve as viable bases of political support, then these groups will go unmobilized and the cleavage will remain politically irrelevant. While Posner explains why groups are coopted in one of his sites, he doesn’t explain why groups don’t get coopted in the other. In this case, his counterfactual is incomplete. Furthermore, he fails to account for key confounders such as colonial effects, cultural ties, and country effects. Instead, he utilizes a country dummy variable and concludes that size is the key factor with- out elaborating the connection between country specific variables and the importance in the size of groups.
Posner, Daniel N. 2004. “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi.” Amer- ican Political Science Review. 98(4): 529 - 545.
argues that when testing on issues of ethnicity in Africa, respondents are less likely to report a preference for coethnic politicians when they report their preference publicly or when they have made conscious of the ethnic connotations of their choice. This is because those interacting with non-coethnics hold stronger implicit ethnic preferences in the first place. This study indicates that gathering unbiased electoral preferences from African survey respondents will require granting respondents privacy and avoid priming, and that the researchers should record and control for the ethnicity of observers. This taps into the issue of social desirability bias where respondents self-censor. However, since social desirability relies heavily on local or national context, instead of regional, it becomes difficult to identify relationships between ethnic groups and whether or not a respondent is being primed by an enumerator of a particular ethnic group. A second pressing issue in Carlson’s study is a matter of whether certain ethnic groups are in cooperation with each other. It focuses on the conflictual aspect, however, when observing inter-group relations, cooperation is just as important as conflict.
Carlson, Elizabeth. 2016. “Identifying and Interpreting the Sensitivity of Ethnic Voting in Africa.” Public Opinion Quarterly. 80(4): 837 - 857.
