Although scholars often treat “ethnicity” as one of the most important phenomena in politics, nothing close to a consensus has emerged about not only what its effects are but also what it is. Theorists typically divide this debate into two camps, usually dubbed “primordialism” and “constructivism,” but these categories are unhelpful and actually obscure some of the most important questions. This study recasts the debate by providing a micro-level explanation for why and how people tend to think and act in terms of macro-level identity categories in the first place. Drawing heavily on recent psychological research, this approach reveals why ethnicity is special and why it is ascribed importance by researchers in fields as diverse as sociology, anthropology, and political science. As it turns out, neither constructivism nor primordialism is fully accurate, and theorists are advised to think in terms that are more consistent with psychological research.
Research on regime change has often wound up chasing events in the post-Soviet world because it has frequently assumed that regime change, if not simple instability, implies a trajectory toward a regime-type endpoint like democracy or autocracy. A supplemental approach recognizes that regime change can be cyclic, not just progressive, regressive, or random. In fact, regime cycles are much of what we see in the postcommunist world, where some states have oscillated from autocracy toward greater democracy, then back toward more autocracy, and, with recent “colored revolutions,” toward greater democracy again. An institutional logic of elite collective action, focusing on the effects of patronalpresidentialism, is shown to be useful in understanding such cyclic dynamics, explaining why “revolutions” occurred between 2003 and 2005 in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan but not in countries like Russia, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan.
This article asks why some ethnically distinct regions fight fiercely to secede while others struggle to save the same multinational state. It tests competing explanations using a new dataset containing forty-five cases, significantly more than any previous study in the Soviet setting. The empirical results confirm arguments that the most separatist regions tend to be those possessing the most wealth, containing the least assimilated ethnic groups and already enjoying the greatest levels of autonomy. Demonstration effects are also found to be powerful. No support is found for prominent theories pointing to group upward mobility and ‘skill sets’ as being decisive. Group histories of grievous exploitation or national independence are found not to explain patterns of secessionism.
Works on the 1848 revolutions, 1989 collapse of European communism, 1998-2005 postcommunist color revolutions, and 2011 Arab uprisings frequently cross-reference each other, implying what is called here the concept of a "regime change cascade." Research on these "Big Four" events shows that cascading can occur in protest calling for regime change as well as revolution in the name of regime change, but these rarely lead to actual regime change. Regime change cascades can occur through demonstration effects and active mediation, although common external causes and contemporaneous domestic triggers can cause events outwardly resembling them. Regime change cascades tend to occur where (a) there exists a common frame of political reference, (b) unpopular leaderships are becoming lame ducks; (c) elites lack other focal points for coordinated defection, and (d) structural conditions supporting a new regime type are in place. Cascading to hybrid regimes or autocracy may be more likely than cascading to democracy.
Federal states in which component regions are invested with distinct ethnic content are more likely to collapse when they contain a core ethnic region, a single ethnic region enjoying pronounced superiority in population. Dividing a dominant group into multiple federal regions reduces these dangers. A study of world casesfindsthat all ethnofederal states that have collapsed have possessed core ethnic regions. Thus, ethnofederalism, so long as it is instituted without a core ethnic region, may represent a viable way of avoiding the most deadly forms of conflict while maintaining state unity in ethnically divided countries.
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