Struggling over the Boundaries of Belonging: A Formal Model of Nation Building, Ethnic Closure, and Populism

Abstract

This article explores the conditions under which political modernization leads to nation building, to the politicization of ethnic cleavages, or to populism by modeling these three outcomes as more or less encompassing exchange relationships between state elites, counterelites, and the population. Actors seek coalitions that grant them the most advantageous exchange of taxation against public goods and of military support against political participation. Modeling historical data on the distribution of these resources in France and the Ottoman Empire from 1500 to 1900 shows that nation building results from strong state centralization and well-established civil societies; ethnic closure, from weak state capacity and civil societies; and populism, from medium centralization and weak civil societies. The results are consistent with French and Ottoman political histories of the 18th and 19th centuries. The Western nation-state is based on a new form of drawing political boundaries, replacing the horizontal strata of agricultural empires with the vertical division between various national communities and their respective states. In many modernizing states in the global South, however,

Is Diversity Detrimental? Ethnic Fractionalization, Public Goods Provision, and the Historical Legacies of Stateness

“…From the 18th century onward, it also provided public goods by financing local police, postal services, construction and repair projects, and the "hospitals" that cared for and at the same time confined and controlled orphans, the poor, and the sick. In the Third Republic, finally, a massive boost in state capacity occurred, and the center now mandated and financed public schooling for the entire population, new hospitals for the poor and sick, policing in every commune of the country, and so on (for details, the online appendix to Kroneberg & Wimmer, 2012). The result of this increase in public goods provision was, as Eugene Weber (1979) has shown in a seminal historical study, that fewer and fewer speakers of minority languages identified as Provençale, Aquitaine, Occidental, and so forth, rather than as French.…”

When and why do some social cleavages become politically salient rather than others?

“…Some who have tackled the question have located their answers, as Lipset and Rokkan did, in the gyre of history. For these authors, the salience of particular social cleavages depends on the stage of historical development in which the political system happens to be located at the time (e.g., Kronenberg and Wimmer 2012). Others have pointed to the impact of colonial institutions in reifying particular social cleavages over others (e.g., Laitin 1986).…”

Notes on a cultural sociology of immigrant incorporation

“…Sociological research tends to neglect overarching group memberships and instead focus on ethnic group boundaries -their construction, maintenance and relationships to inequality and processes of social exclusion (c.f. Alba and Nee, 2003;Alba, 2005;Wimmer, 2008Wimmer, , 2009Massey and Sá nchez, 2010;Kroneberg and Wimmer, 2012).…”

“…Alba's (2005) bright and blurred boundaries suggest that in some contexts the boundary between ethnic minorities and the mainstream majority is blurred, allowing the retention of some ethnic group attachments and characteristics, and in other contexts the boundary is bright and requires total abandonment of ethnic group characteristics. Wimmer has extended this insight and developed a comprehensive typology of the boundaries between ethnic groups, including the development of global, civil and local identities that decrease the significance of ethnicity (Wimmer, 2008(Wimmer, , 2009Kroneberg and Wimmer, 2012). The approach I outline in this article has some commonalities with the ethnic boundary approach, namely, a view that group boundaries are amenable to change and not necessarily based upon material differences.…”

“…9 8 C.f. Barth (1969); Alba and Nee (2003); Alba (2005); Wimmer (2008); Kroneberg and Wimmer (2012). 9 Epistemology and praxis are distinct from Bourdieu's practice and doxa (Bourdieu and Nice, 1977).…”