Measuring the Effect of “Ethnicity”

Abstract

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.

Ethnic Exclusion, Armed Conflict, and Leader Survival

“…skin color, eye color, language, religion, and parents' place of birth). The salience of a particular subset of those attributes is then a function of the leader's strategy shaped by political institutions (Chandra and Wilkinson 2008;Posner 2004;Scarritt and Mozaffar 1999). In this sense, my argument is more in line with the "instrumentalist" view that ethnicity is socially constructed by elites for instrumental purposes.…”

Group Inequality and Environmental Sustainability: Insights from Bangladesh and Kenyan Forest Commons

“…Researchers differentiate between "ethnic structure" that refers to the distribution of descent-based attributes, i.e., nominal identities; and "ethnic practice" that refers to the act of individuals employing one or more identities embedded in this structure to guide behaviour in a particular context, i.e., activated identities [49]. Group identity based on ethnic structure and practice is also contested in the historiography of ethnicity.…”

Ethno-Political Effects of Suburbanization in the Vilnius Urban Region: An Analysis of Voting Behavior

“…However, if political parties representing the interests of ethnic minorities join the elections, this might mobilize ethnic minority voters to express their political views more actively in order to gain greater socio-political influence (George el al. 2010;Wolfinger 1965;Chandra and Wilkinson 2008). According to Crowley (2001), political participation of ethnic minorities can also reflect their identity processes.…”