Diversity and Conflict

Abstract

This research advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that interpersonal population diversity, rather than fractionalization or polarization across ethnic groups, has been pivotal to the emergence, prevalence, recurrence, and severity of intrasocietal conflicts. Exploiting an exogenous source of variations in population diversity across nations and ethnic groups, as determined predominantly during the exodus of humans from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, the study demonstrates that population diversity, and its impact on the degree of diversity within ethnic groups, has contributed significantly to the risk and intensity of historical and contemporary civil conflicts. The findings arguably reflect the contribution of population diversity to the non‐cohesiveness of society, as reflected partly in the prevalence of mistrust, the divergence in preferences for public goods and redistributive policies, and the degree of fractionalization and polarization across ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups.

Introducing the Historical Index of Ethnic Fractionalization (HIEF) Dataset: Accounting for Longitudinal Changes in Ethnic Diversity

“…There have also been efforts to overcome simple fractionalization measures by focusing on conjunctures with other heterogeneities such as the index of ethnic inequality [3] that puts forward the inter-section of ethnic diversity and economic inequality or an index that combines five cleavages, namely race, language, religion, region, and income [27]. Other indices make an effort to account for the distance between groups [16], the historical depth of ethnic cleavages [10] or consider heterogeneity between individuals rather than groups [4].…”

Divided We Stay Home: Social Distancing and Ethnic Diversity

“…The paper also relates to the literature on the impact of diversity on development outcomes. Ethnic diversity is often found to be detrimental for outcomes such as economic growth (Easterly and Levine, 1997;Alesina and Ferrara, 2005), public good provision (Alesina et al, 1999), and civil conflicts (Montalvo and Reynal-Querol, 2005;Rohner et al, 2013;Arbatli et al, 2020). 6 However, in recent years there was some evidence that diversity can also be beneficial for productivity (Ottaviano and Peri, 2006;Peri, 2012), innovation (Lee, 2015), and economic development (Alesina et al, 2016;Ager and Brueckner, 2018;Montalvo and Reynal-Querol, 2020).…”

The origins of the division of labor in pre-industrial times

“…Second, this research contributes to the literature on the effects of diversity on economic development, which has previously been explored using various country-level measures of genetic, ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity (Easterly and Levine, 1997;Alesina et al, 2003;Desmet et al, 2012Desmet et al, , 2015; Ashraf and Galor, 2013a,b;Arbatlı et al, 2020;Cook, 2015;Alesina et al, 2016). While most of the existing empirical evidence, suggests that diversity adversely affects contemporary social cohesiveness and development, this paper documents a positive effect of intra-ethnic diversity on a key driver of economic development.…”

“…First, regardless of the intraethnic diversity measure employed, the IV estimates are larger than the OLS estimates, suggesting a potential downward bias due to measurement error, omitted factors or reverse causality. Also, the IV point estimates may reflect a local average treatment effect due to the existence of imperfect compliers of the instrument (Arbatlı et al, 2020). Second, as could be expected, the ratio of IV to OLS estimates is larger for the linguistic measures of intra-ethnic diversity, since measurement error and factors other than the serial founder effect, such as cultural evolution , may affect these measures more.…”

“…Finally, this research contributes to the emerging literature that uses genetic diversity to understand the deep-rooted determinants of modern comparative development (Ashraf and Galor, 2013b;Arbatlı et al, 2020;Ashraf and Galor, 2013a;Cook, 2015). By additionally using linguistic data, this is the first paper to exploit non-genetic historical proxies of intra-ethnic diversity in the literature.…”