National Political Community and Ethnicity. Evidence from two Latin American Countries

Daniel Moreno is PhD candidate in Political Science at Vanderbilt University with initial training as sociologist in Bolivia. He is member of Ciudadanía, comunidad de estudios sociales y acción pública, a Bolivian NGO focused on social science research, and participates in the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) at Vanderbilt. Earlier versions of this paper benefited from comments by Donna Lee Van Cott, at the 2006 LASA Conference in Puerto Rico, and by Amalia Pallares and other participants of the 2006 Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago, as well as valuable comments from three anonymous reviewers. Mitchell Seligson and Jon Hiskey provided permanent advise and support. The methodological section of the paper received valuable comments and suggestions from Steve Heeringa and Brady West at the University of Michigan, and Mike Ezell and Christian Grose at Vanderbilt. Abstract The political community is the social basis for modern democracies. A strong political community is particularly difficult to achieve when different social cleavages 'divide' society into more or less stable and mutually exclusive groups. Ethnic identities can constitute cleavages whose lines divide society along racial or cultural lines. At the same time, inequality in the distribution of income and property can generate class-based cleavages. Using survey data from the two countries with the highest levels of ethnic diversity in Latin America, Bolivia and Guatemala, this paper focuses on the effect of ethnicity on the strength of the attachment that citizens have to their political nations. Findings suggest that ethnicity has a relevant effect on the way people feel about the nation only when ethnic differences are consistent with socioeconomic cleavages, but socioeconomic differences have an effect that is independent from other factors.