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Most tests of hypotheses about the effects of “ethnicity” on outcomes use data or measures that confuse or conflate what are termed ethnic structure and ethnic practice. This article presents a conceptualization of ethnicity that makes the distinction between these concepts clear; it demonstrates how confusion between structure and practice hampers the ability to test theories; and it presents two new measures of ethnic practice—ECI (the ethnic concentration index) and EVOTE (the percentage of the vote obtained by ethnic parties)—that illustrate the pay-offs of making this distinction and collecting data accordingly, using examples from the civil war literature.

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The past century of research has identified a host of economic, political, demographic, and other factors that seem to be associated with the prevalence of riots. The study of riots has, however, probably focused too much on these "push" factors that lead to violence and not enough on understanding the response of the state to riots. Understanding the political incentives that motivate democratic and authoritarian states to sometimes allow riots to take place and at other times to take the strongest possible law-and-order measures to prevent them is key to understanding variation in violence. Scholars also need to pay more attention to the psychological factors that encourage people to riot, and to the micro-logic of target choice within these larger events.

Why do ethnic riots break out when and where they do? Why do some governments try to prevent ethnic riots while others do nothing or even participate in the violence? In this book, Steven I. Wilkinson uses collected data on Hindu-Muslim riots, socio-economic factors and competitive politics in India to test his theory that riots are fomented in order to win elections and that governments decide whether to stop them or not based on the likely electoral cost of doing so. He finds that electoral factors account for most of the state-level variation in Hindu-Muslim riots: explaining for example why riots took place in Gujarat in 2002 but not in many other states where militants tried to foment violence. The general electoral theory he develops for India is extended to Ireland, Malaysia and Romania as Wilkinson shows that similar political factors motivate ethnic violence in many different countries.