Suchergebnisse

Research on the effects of ethnic politics abounds, but much less attention has been paid to where and why ethnic parties form. This article tests the explanatory power of rational-choice and social-movement informed approaches to ethnic party formation which, it argues, differ in their assumptions about the location of agency (elite vs grassroots) and motives for party formation (office- vs policy-seeking). The assumptions are tested through an analysis of original data on party registration and socio-economic factors in 327 Bolivian municipalities during the 2004 local elections. The elections took place under new electoral rules during a period of political restructuring, allowing an analysis of party entry decisions per se. Through a series of logistic regression models and various robustness checks, this article finds that social-movement approaches are better able to explain ethnic party formation, and in particular that grievances over political maladministration and socio-economic inequalities drive ethnic party formation.

The consequences of marginalized ethnic group emancipation for historically privileged groups are rarely examined, despite assertions that the disruption of traditional power balances leads to backlash. This paper addresses identity change in a 'most probable case' of intergroup threat, examining reactions to indigenous empowerment in Bolivia. After translating theory on identity change into testable implications, it explores meso-level rhetoric of the Santa Cruz Autonomy movement through diverse sources and micro-level identification through time-series survey data. It finds evidence for the constructionist power of discourse: its ability to create societal consensus on collective identity in a relatively short time span.

Ethnic diversity is considered detrimental to national unity, especially if ethnicity is politically mobilized: ethnic parties in electoral competition in particular are thought to increase the salience of ethnic differences and with it ethnic tensions. Yet the individual links of this psychological chain have only been examined cross-sectionally, and never together. This paper employs original longitudinal survey data to simultaneously assess changes in ingroup identification, outgroup aversion, and national identification over the election period within one diverse society: Romania. While ingroup identification does increase, ethnic relations do not worsen. On the contrary, outgroup aversion decreases while national identification increases, for minority and majority Romanian citizens alike. I explain these findings with the common ingroup identity model from social psychology: elections in ethnically diverse societies may not only increase the salience of ethnic groups but also that of the superordinate, national identity. The findings question the often-assumed automaticity of intergroup threat.

This article presents an analysis of the link between ethnic politics and identification in Bolivia. It does so by, first, qualitatively examining the development of political identity discourses and, second, quantitatively examining two dimensions of indigenous identification-self-categorization and cohesion-through time-series survey data. The analyses show that ethnic identifications do indeed change with changing political discourses, that they do so more quickly than expected, and not necessarily in the manner as expected: the type of reaction in identification depends on the type of dominant discourse, demonstrating that it is necessary to distinguish different elements of ethnic identification. Adapted from the source document.

Research on the relationship between nationhood and individual attitudes prominently focuses on whether – and how – the distinction between ethnic and civic conceptions may be drawn in mass public opinion. We depart from this literature to explain the effects of party rhetoric on shaping more restrictive conceptions of nationhood, which previous research refers to as 'ethnic', 'objective', or 'ascriptive' views on nationhood. We do so in three parts: we examine whether political rhetoric, in terms of party manifestos, and individual-level conceptions of nationhood are linked; whether the relationship depends on the ideological alignment between political parties and respondents; and whether political rhetoric and individual predisposition act in combination. We analyze three waves of survey data from the International Social Survey Program's National Identity module from 1995, 2003 and 2013, covering 58,498 respondents from 39 countries. We find that political rhetoric influences respondents' conceptions of nationhood. This effect, however, is not as straightforward as initially expected. While the overall political climate does not have a direct effect at the societal level, it does affect the way in which a specific party's political messages influence the attitudes of their individual recipients. Once the political climate is more ethnocentric, conceptions of nationhood tend to be more restrictive across the board, even among respondents aligned with parties that do not emphasize ethnic conceptions.

The legitimacy of the electoral process is crucial for the consolidation of democracy. We here focus on individual perceptions of electoral integrity (IPEI) and seek to understand what factors can explain different degrees of IPEI. In particular, we use the sixth wave of the World Values Survey (2010–14) to examine how antiauthoritarian values affect individuals' directional bias, driven by political party support, in evaluating electoral integrity. The results show that IPEI do depend on an interaction of political party support and the strength of antiauthoritarian values. However, the addition of the latter does not lead to a convergence of integrity evaluations among winners and losers, as may be expected under the assumption that antiauthoritarian values drive voters to more carefully monitor and evaluate the electoral process. Instead, it leads to greater polarization between electoral winners and losers. We explain the result with reference to the motivated reasoning literature on biased information processing: While antiauthoritarian convictions lead people to obtain more information on the electoral process, their political leanings bias their reading of this information, which in effect leads to stronger polarization in perceptions.