Ethnicity and Electoral Politics

Abstract

This book asks what distinguishes peaceful plural democracies from violent ones and what distinguishes violent ethnic groups from peaceful ones within the same democracy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it suggests that ethnic groups and their political demands are not inherently intransigent and that violence is not a necessary corollary of ethnic politics. The book posits that ethnic identity serves as a stable but flexible information shortcut for political choices, influencing party formation and development in new and maturing democracies. It furthermore argues that political intransigence and violence expressed by some ethnic groups stem from circumstances exogenous to ethnic affiliations. In particular, absolute restrictions on ethnic access to the executive produce conditions under which ethnic group incentive to participate in peaceful electoral politics is eliminated. A number of case studies and statistical analysis of all electoral democracies since 1945 are used to test and support the formal argument.

Elections and Ethnic Civil War

“…Moreover, our group-level analysis leaves out an important layer of political actors, such as political parties and rebel organizations, which usually are the directly responsible and active agents in the outbreak of conflicts. Information about such organizations can be very helpful in further evaluating competing explanations of the influence of ethnic politics on civil war violence (see Birnir, 2007). The current research design, based on yearly observations, is relatively crude as regards the precise sequence of elections and violence.…”

“…8. In an earlier version we followed Birnir (2007) and relied on International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA's) coding using the Quality of Government data set (Teorell, Charron, Samanni, Holmberg, & Rothstein, 2009). Careful checking, however, revealed that the coverage of the IDEA data seemed incomplete, and they cannot be assumed to cover all elections.…”

“…Other scholars have challenged such a negative view of the dangers of "premature" democratization on empirical grounds. Birnir (2007) comes to the opposite conclusion, namely, that the first democratically held elections actually tend to stabilize ethnic politics. Her findings indicate that, in the long run, such a stabilizing effect may be sustained through inclusive representation of all ethnic groups in the legislative and executive process.…”

Integrating Data on Ethnicity, Geography, and Conflict

“…Their Minorities at Risk (MAR) dataset broke new ground as regards the political relevance of ethnic groups and soon became the standard source for studies of ethnic mobilization, protest, and ethnic group rebellion (see, e.g., Birnir 2007;Gurr and Moore 1997;Ishiyama 2009;Olzak 2006;Walter 2006).…”

Tendencias electorales de los grupos indígenas en Chile

“…De igual forma, un predictor del desempeño de los partidos indígenas es la magnitud de distrito. Cuando el número de escaños disponibles en cada unidad geográfico-electoral es más alto, aumentan las probabilidades de éxito para estos partidos y para colectividades más pequeñas (Coppedge, 1997;Birnir, 2006).…”