To be or not to be? Material incentives and indigenous identification in Latin America

ABSTRACT

Latin American governments have recently implemented race conscious policies to provide resources to stigmatized groups like indigenous people. Nevertheless, critics have questioned the legitimacy of these policies and argued that they could artificially induce indigenous identification. Such claim, however, has never been tested. We use a causal inference approach based on nationally-representative survey experiments applied door-to-door in Mexico and Peru to examine whether material incentives can indeed encourage indigenous identification. Our results are counterintuitive. Reminding respondents of potential material benefits of indigenous identification does not increase such identification. It reduces it. We theorize this negative effect may be driven by the fact that receiving social benefits is stigmatized. Our findings call into question critics’ concerns that ethnic-based redistributive policies necessarily incentivize ethnic identification. These results not only provide compelling evidence of the social construction of ethnic identities, but they also seemingly challenge purely instrumentalist models of ethnic identification.

KEYWORDS:

• Race and ethnicity in Latin America
• indigenous people
• ethnic identification
• survey experiments

Acknowledgement

We thank Christina Sue, Ariela Schachter, Angela Dixon, Ali Chaudhary, Aída Villanueva Montalvo, Daniel Schneider, and Ernesto Castañeda for generously providing helpful suggestions and valuable comments. We also thank Elizabeth Zechmeister, Rubi Arana, and Mollie J. Cohen at the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP). All errors are uniquely our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In addition, Peruvian officials have established “indigenous quotas” to increase the numbers of indigenous candidates in local and regional elections (see Aguila Peralta and Suito 2012).

2 For more technical information on LAPOP’s samples, visit: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/core-surveys.php

3 We thank Aída Villanueva Montalvo for this insight.

4 Our ads reached to 992,030 Facebook users in both countries resulting in 29,604 clicks on our survey’s link. Our ad campaign lasted from January 7, 2018 to March 30, 2018.

5 Our dependent variable, indigenous identification, was identical to the one we used in the first experiment. However, since this was a computer-based survey, the options “don’t know” and “no response” were not included.