Globalization, political institutions and ethnic assertiveness: An empirical study of 32 developing countries

Abstract

Although there has been an ever increasing body of work that has examined the relationship between electoral rules and ethnic conflict, relatively few works have examined the effects of political institutions as a means to contain (or at least alter) the course of ethnic conflict under the conditions of globalization and economic integration. In this paper I build upon an earlier work that examined the relationship between globalization, democratization and ethnic conflict. In that piece it was found that globalization did not appear to have a direct relationship with ethnic conflict, but did appear to be related to ethnic political ‘awakening’. This article builds upon that previous work by empirically examining the effects of both globalization and institutional arrangements for 32 developing countries and 90 minority groups. Further, the paper employs a multivariate technique that evaluates the effect of globalization, components of the electoral system, parliamentarism, federalism, cultural differences and the state of the economy.

Notes

1. Protest scores were coded from zero to five where: 0 = no protest reported; 1 = verbal opposition (public letters, petitions, posters, publications, agitation, etc.); 2 = symbolic resistance, scattered acts of symbolic resistance (e.g. sit-ins, blockage of traffic, sabotage, symbolic destruction of property) or political organizing activity on a substantial scale; 3 = small demonstrations, rallies, strikes and/or riots, total participation of fewer than 10 000; 4 = medium-size demonstrations, rallies, strikes and/or riots, total participation of fewer than 100 000; 5 = mass demonstrations, rallies, strikes and/or riots, total participation greater than 100 000.

2. 0 = no conflict manifest; 1 = acts of harassment; 2 = political agitation; 3 = sporadic violent attacks; 4 = anti-group demonstrations; 5 = communal rioting; 6 = communal warfare.

3. Population Division of the United Nations Secretariat, data available online at: http://www.unpopulation.org, accessed February 2003.

4. I employ the natural log of the average district magnitude measure, since average district magnitude fails to conform to the assumption of a distribution that approaches normality, and since it is common practice when estimating OLS models to transform such independent variables.

5. To determine the degree of difference between the target minority group and other population groups, in terms of cultural differentials, the six dimensions were combined into a composite index using the following coding scheme in the MAR data:

• CULDIFXX Cultural Differentials Index

• Value Label

•  0 No differences;

•  1 Slight differentials;

•  2 Substantial differentials;

•  3 Major differentials;

•  4 Extreme differentials.