Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability

Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability

Ethnic divisions, according to empirical democratic theory, and commonsense understandings of politics, threaten the survival of democratic institutions. One of the principal mechanisms linking the politicization of ethnic divisions with the destabilization of democracy is the so-called “outbidding effect.” According to theories of ethnic outbidding, the politicization of ethnic divisions inevi...

Ethnic Diversity and Democratic Stability

Ethnic Cleavage Structures, Permanent Exclusion and Democratic Stability

Strategic Voting for Ethnic Parties

The presumption in the theoretical literature on ethnic mobilization is that voting for ethnic parties is a purely expressive act, not subject to cost-benefit calculations. Models of strategic voting, meanwhile, typically make no reference to the ethnic identity of voters and parties. This article challenges the presumption that voting for ethnic parties is primarily an expressive act. It devel...

Ethnic Voters and Non-Ethnic Parties: Evidence from Bosnia-Herzegovina

While much scholarly attention has been paid to whether institutions encourage or discourage ethnic mobilization, many of these theories leave little room for the choices of individual voters and thus risk being overly deterministic. This paper seeks to define a rough theory that allows for individual voters to have varying preferences over the provision of public goods along ethnic or non-ethn...