WHAT IS ETHNIC IDENTITY AND DOES IT MATTER? Forthcoming in the Annual Review of Political Science

Since the publication of Donald Horowitz’s Ethnic Groups in Conflict, there has been an increasing convergence on the classification of ethnic identities among comparative political scientists. But there is no agreement on the definition that justifies this classification – and the definitions that individual scholars propose do not match their classifications. This article proposes a definition that captures the conventional classification of ethnic identities in comparative political science to a greater degree than the alternatives. According to this definition, “ethnic identities” are a subset of identity categories in which membership is determined by attributes associated with, or believed to be associated with, descent (described in the article simply as “descent-based attributes”). I argue, on the basis of the definition proposed here, that ethnicity either does not matter, or has not been shown to matter, in explaining most outcomes to which it has been causally linked by comparative political scientists, including violence, democratic stability and patronage.