Democratizing with Ethnic Divisions: A Source of Conflict?
| Published date | 01 September 2001 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343301038005001 |
| Date | 01 September 2001 |
| Author | Demet Yalcin Mousseau |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
547
Introduction
Do ethnic divisions in a nation inevitably lead
to extreme levels of political violence? If not,
what are the factors that foster political vio-
lence in multi-ethnic societies? While pri-
mordialists attribute the politicization of
ethnic groups for violence to primordial
characteristics of ethnicity, and consider the
existence of ethnic divisions in a nation as a
sufficient condition for the occurrence of vio-
lence, instrumentalists suggest that ethnic
groups are usually stable but mobilize at times
with the impact of certain environmental
conditions. Whether political violence in
multi-ethnic nations is primordial or environ-
mental is an important question considering
that the intensity of ethnicity-related political
violence around the world has been increasing
since the 1970s (Gurr & Harff, 1994).
The purpose of this study is thus to
investigate the possibility of a conditional
(interactive) relationship between ethnic het-
erogeneity and political and economic factors
as they affect levels of political violence in
nations. Consistent with previous research,
both democracy and economic development
are expected to relate to political violence in
an inverted U-shape form. In corollary, it is
also expected that democratizing nations
have higher levels of extreme political vio-
lence than nations with stable political insti-
tutions. However, as the instrumentalist
© 2001 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 38, no. 5, 2001, pp. 547–567
Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi)
[0022-3433(200109)38:5; 547–567; 019465]
Democratizing with Ethnic Divisions: A Source of
Conflict?*
DEMET YALCIN MOUSSEAU
Department of International Relations, Koç University
This article investigates the conditions that are conducive to extreme political violence in ethnically
heterogeneous nations. Theories of resource mobilization, ethnic competition, and split labor market
propose that democratization and economic modernization encourage ethnic competition, increasing
the likelihood of extreme political violence within nations experiencing political and economic change.
In the light of these theories, the conditions that possibly foster conflict in multi-ethnic nations are
identified with respect to levels of democracy, political change (or democratization), and levels of econ-
omic development. The effects of these variables on extreme political violence are examined with several
logit regression analyses on a pooled time-series sample of 126 nations from 1948 to 1982. The find-
ings show that ethnic heterogeneity is not associated with higher levels of violence within nations, except
under certain political conditions. Both democracy and economic development relate to political vio-
lence in a curvilinear inverted U-shape form. For ethnically heterogeneous societies, however, the
inverted U-curve for democracy is asymmetric, with democracy’s pacifying impact relative to semi-
democracies only about half as potent as in ethnically homogeneous societies and less than that of strict
autocracy.
* I am grateful to Stuart Bremer, Frank Cohen, Scott
Gates, Håvard Hegre, Richard Hofferbert, Michael
Mousseau, Richard Tucker, Jack Snyder, Eduard A. Ziegen-
hagen, and the reviewers at JPR for their helpful comments
and insights. The data used in this article can be found at
http://www.prio.no/jpr/datasets.asp.
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ethnic politics literature suggests, democracy
and economic development might increase
the probability of extreme political violence if
multiple ethnic groups exist within a nation.
These hypotheses are tested using maximum
likelihood estimation techniques on a pooled
time-series sample for 126 nations for each
year during the period 1948–82.
In the following section, I briefly review
previous research on political violence. Follow-
ing this, I describe the theoretical expectations
and the hypotheses to be tested. The article
then proceeds with the operationalizations,
measures, and data sources of the dependent
and the independent variables. In the final sec-
tions, I report on the empirical findings and
draw conclusions on the implications of this
study for domestic conflict studies.
Research on Political Violence
In analyzing domestic political violence, most
empirical cross-national studies hypothesize
and test the existence of ethnic heterogeneity,
autocratic governance, and economic under-
development (or peripheral status in the
world system) as contributory factors to the
occurrence of political violence within
nations (Boswell & Dixon, 1990; Brown &
Boswell, 1997; Hibbs, 1973; Muller, 1985;
Muller & Seligson, 1987; Schock, 1996;
Sigelman & Simpson, 1977; Weede, 1981).
These studies usually focus on certain indi-
cators of relative deprivation and resource
mobilization, such as income inequality,
economic development, and regime repres-
siveness, as facilitating conditions for the
occurrence of group grievances (see Boswell
& Dixon, 1990; Muller, 1985). Employing
cross-national designs, they are particularly
concerned with the short-term effects of these
political and economic variables on political
violence. Boswell & Dixon (1990), for
example, assert that such structural variables
as income inequality and regime repressive-
ness have a ‘relatively instantaneous effect’ on
political violence, so they can be tested for
short-term periods. They therefore use cross-
national designs to test these variables, regard-
less of the variation across time.1
Another stream of research in the same
literature concentrates on the impact of
democracy and economic development on
various forms of domestic political conflict,
controlling for ethnic heterogeneity as a con-
tributory factor to political violence. Studies
in this stream suggest that the more demo-
cratic or economically developed a nation,
the less likely it will experience violent forms
of political conflict. Most of these studies
produce supportive empirical findings for
this hypothesis (Flanigan & Fogelman, 1970;
Rummel, 1997; Sigelman & Simpson, 1977;
Weede, 1981; Ziegenhagen, 1994).
However, what is less well understood in
the political violence literature is, first, the
long-term impact of the variation in different
levels of democracy, and change in these levels
(the process of democratization), on extreme
political violence, and, second, how these
macro-structural factors affect the incidence
and intensity of violence in multi-ethnic
societies. Accordingly, in this article I investi-
gate the relationship between ethnic hetero-
geneity and political violence, with several
conditional (interactive) hypotheses that
specify this relationship with respect to vari-
ation in these structural conditions. Below, I
outline several of these varying conditions
and consequent hypotheses, starting with
two competing views in the ethnicity litera-
ture: the primordialist and the instrumentalist
(Douglass, 1988; Glazer & Moynihan, 1975;
McKay, 1982; Scott, 1990).
The Primordialist Approach
The primordialist approach conceives ethnic
bonds as highly persistent and significant
journal of PEACE RESEARCH volume 38 / number 5 / september 2001
548
1Boswell & Dixon (1990) accept that the reason they use a
cross-national design in their research is partly due to the fact
that the long-term data do not exist for income inequality.
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