The Political Origins of Inequality and Ethnic Difference

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Ethnic diversity and inequality are key factors shaping political competition and economic privilege across the developing world. Scholars often take these features of the political context as fixed, examining how politicians respond to given demographic landscapes. But the identity cleavages and social status hierarchies around which political power and economic privilege are now distributed have not emerged separately from the dynamics of political competition. Instead, these cleavages can be deeply endogenous to politics -- explicitly created by political actors or state policy.

This panel combines four papers that examine different ways in which politicians or state actions have manipulated or reshaped ethnic identity and/or economic inequality in the developing world, and also explore the effects of these actions on contemporary political outcomes. Our empirical examples span historical periods and world regions, emphasizing commonalities across sub-fields within Comparative Politics, and utilize a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods.

The first two papers examine the political manipulation of ethnic identity. Robinson examines a strategic effort by contemporary Malawian politics to invent a new ethnic cleavage amidst contemporary electoral competition, including through the creation of a new “traditional” chieftaincy. Livny looks more historically, exploring the strategic undercounting of Kurdish minorities by the early-Republican Turkish government, and more broadly demonstrating how census design -- especially the decision about what to enumerate -- can have long term political implications. The second two papers instead examine the origins and effects of intra-ethnic inequality. Nathan traces how the invention of chieftaincy by the early colonial state in Northern Ghana shapes contemporary intra-ethnic inequality and explains the formation of the region’s political and economic elite. Drawing on work from her book project, Suryanarayan details how politicians manipulate intra-ethnic inequality to divide socio-economic classes, unite ethnic coalitions, and prevent economic redistribution, drawing on empirical material from contemporary and colonial India, as well as the historical United States.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 12: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries

Cosponsor

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Social-Status and Redistributive Politics - Pavithra Suryanarayan, Johns Hopkins University

• Inventing Traditional Authority in Malawi - Amanda Lea Robinson, Ohio State University

• Colonial Institutions and Intra-Ethnic Inequality - Noah Nathan, University of Michigan

• The Politics of Counting and Miscounting in Turkey - Avital Livny, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Chair

• Evan S. Lieberman Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Discussants

• Evan S. Lieberman Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Jenny Guardado Georgetown University