Measuring Ethnic Inequality: An Assessment of Extant Cross-National Indices

Abstract

This article offers an evaluation of cross-national measures of ethnic socio-economic inequality. It demonstrates that the measures differ in important ways regarding empirical scope, conceptualization, measurement and aggregation. Despite significant advances in the measurement of ethnic inequality, all measures have shortcomings, such as limited and biased coverage, as well as measurement error from the underlying data sources. Moreover, the empirical convergence between conceptually similar measures is strikingly low: some of the measures show no or even negative covariation. Four replication studies also indicate that extant measures of ethnic inequality are generally not interchangeable. Scholars should therefore take the various features highlighted in this evaluation into account before employing any of them. Based on this conclusion, the article offers multiple suggestions for improving existing measures and developing new ones.

Do mutually reinforcing cleavages harm democracy? Inequalities between ethnic groups and autocratization

“…6 However, they contain fewer countries, data at an aggregate level, often do not find a direct effect of horizontal inequality on democratic breakdown, are not updated and, most importantly, lack clear criteria on how different ethnic group lists are aggregated across different sources. As demonstrated recently, 7 sources on ethnicity can hardly be comparable and the findings of these analyses are difficult to be replicated. This is the case because different sources often adopt different ethnic group lists.…”

“…Although we have solid evidence for H1.B, we do not have it for H2.B (with opposite directions in some models). Nonetheless, the logistic models yield some evidence for H3.B, with expected directions and statistical significance in some models (4,6,7,8). The last indicator on the combined index of ethnic inequalities has the correct sign and reaches statistical significance (Model 9 and 10), proving additional evidence for H4.B.…”

“…However, Houle did not find a direct impact of economic inequalities between ethnic groups on democratic breakdown, and the external validity of the analysis has been contested recently by Leipziger. 56 Moreover, the results do not necessarily address autocratization in general and need to be re-tested. This leads to the first hypothesis:…”