Fall 2017 JPI

Ethnopolitical Cleavages
Ethnopolitical Group Fragmentation is a variable based on the "share of the politicized population
that belongs to each ethnopolitical group or subgroup." 19 MSG use their own indice for ethnopolitical
fragmentation that factors in ethnopolitical concentration. This is problematic because ethnopolitical
concentration is considered a separate variable in their model, and in their theory. To boot, they do
not provide a formula for this indice so I instead use Alesina’s newer measure of ethnopolitical
fragmentation. It covers more countries allowing me to analyze a larger share of the data and isolates
the effects of geographic concentration.
Ethnopolitical Group Concentration: I base this variable on the Minorities at Risk dataset that
indicates the ethnic group spatial distribution for each country on a scale from 0 to 3 where 0 = widely
dispersed, 1= primarily urban or minority in one region, 2 = majority in one region, dispersed in
others, and 3 = concentrated in one region. 20 Notably, I shall be incorporating a more updated version
of the Minorities at Risk data released in 2009 now providing statistics for 2004-2006, in addition to
the Phase III dataset used by MSG. The Concentration index is calculated by multiplying the
concentration code by the group’s share of the ethnopolitically relevant population. The sum of these
numbers is the concentration score for each country. I will also include an interaction term of
Ethnopolitical Group Fragmentation X Ethnopolitical Group Concentration to test whether fragmentation and
concentration have a joint effect on the number of parties.
Other Measures of Ethnopolitical Cleavages
In MSG’s paper, they claim that their proposed measure of ethnopolitical cleavages is better
than the traditionally used Ethnolinguistic Fractionalization (ELF) Index and the politically relevant
ethnic groups (PREG) index developed by Posner (2000). It is important to acknowledge that there
are certain challenges in measuring ethnic diversity in the first place. As Fearon has pointed out, a key
problem with the Herfindahl formula used to calculate these indexes is that it cannot account for
specific variation in the ethnic makeups of the countries that we are studying. 21 For instance, if we had
a country with two groups of equal size and another country with three groups encompassing twothirds,
one-sixth, and one-sixth of the population respectively, their indices by the Herfindahl formula
would both be 0.5. Although we solve the problem of variation dependent on the geographic
concentration of ethnic groups across countries, there remains the issue of the inability to measure
the depth of the separations between ethnic groups. This is a relevant problem because one of the
unique aspects of ethnic cleavages in studying coalition and party structure is the depth of separation
between these groups within a country, and the resistant nature of their reconciliations. 22 Another
obstacle to measuring ethnic diversity is that it can be calculated based on many different kinds of
separation—linguistic, religious, caste, etc.
One of the most widely used measures is the ELF (Ethnolinguistic Fractionalization Index).
One problem with the ELF is that it is mostly calculated from data in the Atlas Narodov Mira 23 which
would make its measurements more than fifty years out of date. In addition, as Posner points out, the
ethnic categorizations presented by the Atlas are such that ethnic groups are mostly listed individually
with their corresponding population counts, but in some cases, are grouped into larger families as a
19 Mozaffar, Scarritt, and Galaich, Electoral Institutions, 384.
20 Asal, Victor, Amy Pate and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior Data, September 2008, http://www.mar.umd.edu/data.asp.
21 Fearon, Ethnic and cultural diversity, 207.
22 Rabushka, Alvin, and Kenneth A. Shepsle. Politics in plural societies. Stanford University Press, 1972.
23 Mira, Atlas Narodov. "Atlas of the Peoples of the World." Moscow: Glavnoe Upravlenie Geodezii i Kartografii, 1964.
JPI Fall 2017, pg. 55