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Abstract
Ethnic fragmentation is largely presumed to be bad for democracy. However, many African countries belie this claim, as democracy has recently sprouted in several of its multiethnic states. We argue that African countries that have demographic patterns where the largest ethnopolitical group is at least a near-majority and is simultaneously divided into nested subgroups produce Africa's most democratic multiethnic societies. This large-divided-group pattern, which has gone largely unnoticed by previous scholars, facilitates transitions to democracy from authoritarian rule. The large group's size foments the broad-based multiethnic social agitation needed to pose a genuine threat to a ruling autocrat, while its internal divisions reassure minorities that they will not suffer permanent exclusion via ethnic dominance under an eventual democracy. We support our claim with cross-national quantitative evidence on ethnic fragmentation and regime type.
Acknowledgements
We are extremely grateful for useful comments on earlier drafts to Johanna Birnir, Lars-Erik Cederman, Kenneth Greene, Peter Koehn, Amy Liu and the members of the Institutions group at CU-Boulder's Institute of Behavioral Science (Lee Alston, Jennifer Bair, Carew Boulding, David Brown, Edward Greenberg, Joseph Jupille, Thomas Mayer, Celeste Montoya, and Sarah Sokhey). Thanks also to Christian Houle for assistance with data analysis. Mozaffar acknowledges the research support of the African Studies Center at Boston University and the Center for Legislative Studies at Bridgewater State University. All data, computer code and the Online Appendix are available at http://spot.colorado.edu/~bakerab/. Baker and Scarritt are equal, primary co-authors of this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Supplemental data
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2015.1038250
Notes on Contributors
Andy Baker is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He conducts research on Latin American politics, mass political behaviour, and international political economy. He has written articles for American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Latin American Research Review, and several other journals. He has also published two books: Shaping the Developing World (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2014) and The Market and the Masses in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
James R. Scarritt is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He conducts research on the politics of ethnicity in Africa and electoral and party politics in Zambia. He has authored articles for American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Modern African Studies, and several other journals. He is the co-author or editor of five books.
Shaheen Mozaffar is Professor of Political Science at Bridgewater State University, Research Associate of the Centre for Legislative Studies at Bridgewater State University, and Research Associate of the Centre for Social Science Research at the University of Cape Town. His research focuses on institutional analysis, constitutional designs, democratization, ethnic politics, political parties, electoral systems, elections, and politics and religion. His published works have appeared as book chapters and in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, International Negotiations, International Political Science Review, Journal of Legislative Studies, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, and Political Parties. He is a Co-Principal Investigator of the African Legislatures Project.
Notes on Contributors
Andy Baker is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He conducts research on Latin American politics, mass political behaviour, and international political economy. He has written articles for American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Latin American Research Review, and several other journals. He has also published two books: Shaping the Developing World (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2014) and The Market and the Masses in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
James R. Scarritt is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He conducts research on the politics of ethnicity in Africa and electoral and party politics in Zambia. He has authored articles for American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Modern African Studies, and several other journals. He is the co-author or editor of five books.
Shaheen Mozaffar is Professor of Political Science at Bridgewater State University, Research Associate of the Centre for Legislative Studies at Bridgewater State University, and Research Associate of the Centre for Social Science Research at the University of Cape Town. His research focuses on institutional analysis, constitutional designs, democratization, ethnic politics, political parties, electoral systems, elections, and politics and religion. His published works have appeared as book chapters and in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, International Negotiations, International Political Science Review, Journal of Legislative Studies, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, and Political Parties. He is a Co-Principal Investigator of the African Legislatures Project.
ORCID
Andy Baker http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2234-4416
Notes
1. Dahl, Polyarchy; Rabushka and Shepsle, Politics in Plural Societies.
2. Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies.
3. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict; Powell, Contemporary Democracies.
4. Hadenius, Democracy and Development; Reynolds, Electoral Systems; Weingast, “The Political Foundations of Democracy.”
5. Fearon, “Ethnic Structure and Cultural Diversity,” 204–219.
6. Two other views on cultural diversity and regime type see ethnic demography as irrelevant to democracy, based largely on null statistical findings, or as subordinate in its consequences to political institutions. On the first, see Fish and Brooks, “Does Diversity Hurt Democracy?”; Fearon, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War.” On the second, see Chandra, “Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability”; Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies; Reynolds, Electoral Systems.
7. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government.
8. Dahl, Polyarchy; Rabushka and Shepsle, Politics in Plural Societies; Powell, Contemporary Democracies; Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict.
9. Weingast, “The Political Foundations of Democracy.”
10. Barro, “Determinants of Democracy”; La Porta et al., “The Quality of Government.”
11. Cederman et al., “Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel?”; Roessler, “The Enemy Within”; Daly, “State Strategies.”
12. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict. See also Collier and Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance.”
13. Reilly, “Democracy, Ethnic Fragmentation, and Internal Conflict”; Chandra and Boulet, “Ethnic Diversity and Democratic Stability.”
14. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 36–41; Birnir, Ethnicity and Electoral Politics, 160–199; Arriola, Multiethnic Coalitions in Africa.
15. Przeworski and Limongi, “Modernization.” See also Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins; Boix and Stokes, “Endogenous Democratization.”
16. Chandra, Constructivist Theories.
17. McLaughlin, “Beyond Racial Census.”
18. Eifert et al., “Political Competition and Ethnic Identification.”
19. Bates, “Ethnic Competition and Modernization”; Lynch, I Say to You.
20. Fifty percent might seem like a natural cutting point, but a strong potential for dominance may exist even by groups that are slightly below an absolute majority in size. That said, in our statistical tests below, we do check to see how robust our findings are to relaxations of this threshold.
21. Huntington, The Third Wave.
22. Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins.
23. Bratton and van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa.
24. Herbst, States and Power in Africa.
25. Habyarimana et al., Coethnicity; Easterly and Levine, “Africa's Growth Tragedy”; Elischer, Political Parties in Africa. But see also Baker, “Race, Paternalism, and Foreign Aid.”
26. Franck and Rainer, “Does the Leader's Ethnicity Matter?”
27. For evidence of this, see Ferree, “How Fluid is Fluid?”
28. Quantitative indicators tend to express diversity with the Herfindahl index, which is one minus the probability that any two randomly chosen individuals are from the same ethnic group: , where pi is group i's proportion of the population. Alesina et al., “Fractionalization”; Easterly and Levine, “Africa's Growth Tragedy.”
29. McLaughlin, “Beyond Racial Census.”
30. Bratton and van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa.
31. Decalo, “Benin,” 43–61; Europa Regional Surveys of the World, Africa South of the Sahara, 107–116; Koter, “King Makers.”
32. For more details, see Scarritt and Mozaffar, “The Specification of Ethnic Cleavages”; Mozaffar and Scarritt, “Constructivism, Rationalism.”
33. Posner, “Measuring Ethnic Fractionalization.” Posner's Politically Relevant Ethnic Groups (PREG) dataset also relies on politicization as the criterion for the enumeration of ethnic groups. However, Posner codes groups relevant for economic policy and thus fails to recognize the nestedness of identities.
34. Morrison et al., Black Africa.
35. Gurr, Minorities at Risk.
36. Habyarimana et al., Coethnicity; McLaughlin, “Beyond Racial Census”; Posner, “Measuring Ethnic Fractionalization,” 852; Fearon, “Ethnic Structure and Cultural Diversity.”
37. An exception is Ferree, who exploits the multiple levels in the SM data in two published papers. Ferree, “How Fluid is Fluid?”; Ferree, “The Social Origins of Electoral Volatility.”
38. Homogeneous societies also have values of zero for this reason.
39. This has become the standard statistical approach in the literature. See Przeworski and Limongi, “Modernization”; Boix and Stokes, “Endogenous Democratization”; Houle, “Inequality and Democracy.” That said, to exploit the added information in the ordinal measures of democracy created by Freedom House and Polity, earlier versions of this paper reported the results of ordinary least squares regressions in which the dependent variable was each country's average democracy score (as used in and ). These always returned a strong and statistically significant relationship between our measures of large-divided-group countries and democracy.
40. More specifically, we parsed each independent variable (except the lagged dependent variable) into two variables. One is the original variable recoded to zero for all years in which the lagged dependent variable is zero; the coefficient on this variable estimates its effect on democratic emergence. The other is the original variable recoded to zero for all years in which the lagged dependent variable is one; its coefficient estimates the covariate's effect on survival. This allows for a much more straightforward reading of effect estimates and their standard errors than the (mathematically equivalent) “slope dummy” approach occasionally used in this literature (see Boix and Stokes, “Endogenous Democratization”).
41. Boix et al., “A Complete Data Set”; Cheibub et al., “Democracy and Dictatorship Revisited.”
42. Marshall and Jaggers, Polity IV Project; Freedom House, Freedom in the World.
43. Scores of +6 through +10 are democratic in Polity IV, and scores of 6 through 7 (after flipping) are democratic in Freedom House.
44. Even though only-small-groups and large-undivided-groups societies are separate categories, the proper hypothesis test for our argument treats them as a single category. We are only concerned with comparing democracy levels in LDG countries to all other multiethnic societies writ large.
45. Both are reported in Posner, “Measuring Ethnic Fractionalization.”
46. Reynolds, Electoral Systems.
47. Lindberg, Democracy and Elections.
48. Bratton and van de Walle, Democratic Experiments.
49. Both variables are from Bratton and van de Walle, Political Regimes and Regime Transitions.
50. North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change.
51. World Bank, World Development Indicators.
52. Bratton and van de Walle date the third wave's arrival in Africa to Benin's 1991 election. Bratton and van de Walle, Democratic Experiments.
53. Posner, Institutions and Ethnic Politics.
54. Vail, The Creation of Tribalism; Mozaffar, “The Institutional Logic of Ethnic Politics.”
55. These are according to the Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland dataset.
56. LDG countries Botswana and Mauritius had long (and still ongoing) spells of democracy before 1990, but their transitions are not part of our analysis, since they occurred prior to the third wave.
57. All models were estimated using multiple imputation techniques for missing data. King et al., “Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data”; Royston, “Multiple Imputation of Missing Values.”
58. Although split across two tables, readers should keep in mind that coefficients falling under the same column number in the two different tables were estimated jointly in the same model.
59. Hardgrave, “India: Dilemmas of Diversity”; Reilly, “Democracy, Ethnic Fragmentation, and Internal Conflict.”
60. Osella and Osella, Social Mobility in Kerala.
61. Geertz, The Religion of Java.