The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas Are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi

Posner, Daniel N.

doi:10.1017/s0003055404041334

Cited by 662 publications

(388 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…al (2011), Huber andArceneaux (2007), Krasno and Green (2008) and Posner (2004)). These studies exploit the general fact that laws, regulations, political parties and advertisement campaigns are strongly influenced by geographical borders.…”

Section: Empirical Methodologymentioning

confidence: 98%

Estimating the Impacts of a Fruit Fly Eradication Program in Peru: A Geographical Regression Discontinuity Approach

Salazar

Maffioli²,

Aramburu³

et al. 2016

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work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-IGO BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/ legalcode) and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any non-commercial purpose, as provided below. No derivative work is allowed.Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC-IGO license.Following a peer review process, and with previous written consent by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a revised version of this work may also be reproduced in any academic journal, including those indexed by the American Economic Association's EconLit, provided that the IDB is credited and that the author(s) receive no income from the publication. Therefore, the restriction to receive income from such publication shall only extend to the publication's author(s). With regard to such restriction, in case of any inconsistency between the Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license and these statements, the latter shall prevail.Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license. AbstractIn this paper, we evaluate the short term impact of a Fruit Fly Eradication Program in the coastal areas of Peru. Exploiting arbitrary variation in the program's intervention borders, as well as precise geographic location data of farmer's households, we use a Geographical Regression Discontinuity (GRD) approach to identify the program's effects on agricultural outcomes. For this purpose, baseline and follow up surveys were collected for 615 households -307 treated and 308 controls-. Baseline data shows that producer and farm-level characteristics in treated and control areas are balanced. This confirms that the program's intervention borders were set only as a function of financial and logistic restrictions and independently of the pest incidence levels and/or other producer and/or farm characteristics. The results show that farmers in treated areas improved pest knowledge and are more likely to implement best practices for plague prevention and control. Beneficiary farmers also present increased fruit crops productivity and sales. The robustness of these findings is confirmed using placebo tests.

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Section: Empirical Methodologymentioning

confidence: 98%

Estimating the Impacts of a Fruit Fly Eradication Program in Peru: A Geographical Regression Discontinuity Approach

Salazar

Maffioli²,

Aramburu³

et al. 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Can development have a double standard and advocate democracy for some, but autocracy for the rest?" In other words, FPIC really rests on an assumption of clearly identified and static cultural identities, and the existence of straightforward division between the powerful and the dispossessed along these static ethnic lines, when most ethnic identities are in fact fluid social constructions, dependent on politics and subject to change (Lucero, 2006;Li, 2000;Posner, 2004;Sylvain, 2002).…”

Section: The Challenges Of Ethnic-based Participatory Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

The Politics of Indigenous Participation Through “Free Prior Informed Consent”: Reflections from the Bolivian Case

Fontana

Grugel

2016

World Development

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This article explores the challenges of ethnic-based participation and its potential for creating inclusive and effective forms of decision-making for marginalized social groups. Empirically, it examines a recent attempt to establish more participative forms of resource and development governance for indigenous communities in Bolivia through Free Prior and Informed Consent/Consultation (FPIC). Rooted in international human rights law, FPIC aims at achieving more effective bottom-up participation by establishing an obligation to consult -or obtain the consent of -indigenous peoples before large development projects and legal reforms that would affect them can proceed. Interest in FPIC initiatives has been growing for reasons that range from efforts to build more equitable management of natural resources to attempts to introduce more effective local-scale practices of participation and active citizenship. We argue that the idea of prior consultation and FPIC itself are not neutral instruments; they will not automatically lead to better or more democratic governance and a more equal society. The way in which FPIC is currently being implemented and framed in Bolivia is in tension with broader ideas of representation and legitimacy, inclusiveness and management of public and common goods because there is no real clarity as to who is entitled to participation, why they do and whether they are doing so as a corrective to exclusion, a promotion of citizenship or as a mechanism for redistribution. As we show here, FPIC implementation can have unintended consequences and consultation can sometimes embed existing social, cultural and economic tensions. The paper eventually offers some broader reflections on participatory governance and collective rights especially in relation to the tensions between inclusive participation and exclusive rights or -put differently -the challenges for building cultures of participation and inclusion in complex and ethnic diverse democracies.

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“…However, since individuals almost always possess multiple social identities (e.g. Roccas and Brewer, 2002;Simmel, 1955), this practice is questionable and the assumption of cultural differences that matter politically must itself be explained (Posner, 2004). Moreover, the mechanism of cultural homophily (McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook, 2001;Simpson et al, 2014) may not be the only, or the most important, reason for the political effects of cultural identities: to have an effect, cleavages also need to be activated by political entrepreneurs (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967;Rokkan and Urwin, 1983).…”

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural legacies and political preferences: the failure of separatism in the Swiss Jura

Siroky

Mueller

Hechter

2015

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

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The study of secession generally stresses the causal influence of cultural identities, political preferences or ecological factors. Whereas these different views are often considered to be mutually exclusive, this paper proposes a two-stage model in which they are complementary. We posit that cultural identities matter for explaining secessionism, but not because of primordial attachments.Rather, religious and linguistic groups matter because their members are imbued with cultural legacies that lead to distinct political preferences over welfare statism. Further, ecological constraints such as geography and topography affect social interaction with like-minded individuals. On the basis of both these political preferences and ecological constraints, individuals then make rational choices about the desirability of secession. Instrumental considerations are therefore crucial in explaining the decision to secede, but not in a conventional pocketbook manner. To examine this theory, we analyze the 2013 referendum on the secession of the Jura Bernois region from the canton of Berne in Switzerland, using municipal level census and referendum data. The results lend support to the theory and suggest one way in which the politics of identity, based on factors like language and religion, can be fused with the politics of interest (preferences for more or less state intervention into the polity and economy) to better understand group behavior.Keywords: Secession, referendum, welfare statism, cultural identities, ecological constraints, rational choice 2 Secession is a phenomenon that affects both the developing countries (e.g., Georgia, China, Russia, Ukraine, Nigeria) as well as developed ones (e.g., Spain, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy; Dion, 1996;Sorens, 2012). In several European democracies, like the United Kingdom and Spain (Muñoz and Guinjoan, 2013;Muñoz and Tormos, 2014), secessionist demands are accompanied by calls for a referendum to decide the question once and for all. In others, such as France, Belgium, and Italy, secession is at least sporadically invoked in political discourse when demanding more territorial group rights or fewer payments to poorer areas (Lindsey, 2012;Coppieters and Huysseune, 2002).Despite these developments in European politics, scholars continue to disagree over the relative importance of different mechanisms for understanding secession. Some argue that cultural factors, such as emotions, affect, and social identity, are key to explaining nationalism and separatism (e.g. Smith, 1986;Connor, 1994;Petersen, 2002), whereas others think that they can best be understood in terms of rational action (e.g. Buchanan and Faith, 1987;Wittman, 1991;Bolton and Roland, 1997;Bookman, 1992;Collier and Hoeffler, 2002;Sorens, 2012). Still others emphasize structural constraints on individual decision-making through geographically constrained social networks (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967;Jenkins, 1986;Rutherford et al., 2014). Thus whereas some scholars see secession as largely a matter of the he...

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The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas Are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi

Cited by 662 publications

References 26 publications

Estimating the Impacts of a Fruit Fly Eradication Program in Peru: A Geographical Regression Discontinuity Approach

Estimating the Impacts of a Fruit Fly Eradication Program in Peru: A Geographical Regression Discontinuity Approach

The Politics of Indigenous Participation Through “Free Prior Informed Consent”: Reflections from the Bolivian Case

Cultural legacies and political preferences: the failure of separatism in the Swiss Jura

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