Fall 2017 JPI

single population count. 24 This leads to lumping together some groups that are definitely distinct in
other political and ethnographic studies, which would give the measure a bias indicating less
ethnopolitical fragmentation than existing in reality.
The second measure that MSG investigate is the Politically Relevant Ethnic Groups index
(PREG). In response to the problems with ELF, Posner developed this measure using the Atlas data
as a base population count of the groups, then incorporated secondary sources to weed out groups
unimportant in policymaking and separate the groups that ELF previously grouped together. 25 MSG
rely on the PREG as they claim that it includes more ethnopolitical groups and "hence. . . [they expect]
it to be more closely related to the number of electoral and legislative parties." 26
Finally, in this paper I utilize a third alternative to both the ELF and the PREG. Although less
widely used, Alesina et al.’s measure of ethnic fractionalization is especially useful for the sake of
including more complete indicators for the data I will be using. 27 Alesina et al. developed this new
measure of ethnic fragmentation "based on a broader classification of groups, taking into account not
only language but also other cleavages such as racial characteristics." 28 By offering a new measure of
ethnicity that involves a combination of both racial and linguistic characteristics, Alesina et al.’s
measurement offers a more comprehensive view of the ethnopolitical cleavages present in Africa.
Alesina et al. compiles and cross-references several different sources to procure this data including the
Encyclopedia Britannica (2001), CIA (2000), Levinson (1998), and Minority Rights Group
International (1997), allowing them to cover a much wider range of countries than either the ELF or
PREG. Overall, Alesina et al. incorporate more aspects of ethnopolitical fragmentation rather than
just population, which will also allow a more diverse calculation of my indicator.
DATA AND CASE SELECTION
The data I will be using is a more updated version than used by either MSG or GBC. I will be
using Golder’s Democratic Electoral Systems (DES) dataset, spanning 1946-2011. 29 Using only the
data on Africa, this includes 54 different democratic lower house legislative elections in the national
legislatures of 23 different African countries. Firstly, this will be useful for testing whether both MSG
and BGS’s claims hold true when studying only democratic regimes instead of countries in transition
to democracy as studied before. Each regime meets Golder’s four criteria: (1) the chief executive is
elected, (2) the legislature is elected, (3) there is more than one party competing in elections, and (4) a
change in leadership under identical electoral rules has taken place. Furthermore, Golder’s new data
is an update from the previous two articles with elections spanning till 2011. Now that the third wave
of democracy is settling in Africa, I will strive to observe which side of the debate’s view stands more
strongly for Africa’s democratic elections.
Model Specification
I first use OLS regression to test eight variables, four each of Effective Number of Electoral Parties
and Effective Number of Legislative Parties, following MSG’s paper. Model 1 focuses strictly on the
24 Daniel N. Posner "Measuring ethnic fractionalization in Africa." American journal of political science 48, no. 4 (2004): 849-863.
25 Ibid.
26 Mozaffar, Scarritt, and Galaich, Electoral Institutions, 284.
27 Alesina, Alberto, Arnaud Devleeschauwer, William Easterly, Sergio Kurlat, and Romain Wacziarg. "Fractionalization." Journal of Economic growth 8, no.
2 (2003): 155-194.
28 Ibid, 157.
29 Bormann, Nils-Christian, and Matt Golder. "Democratic electoral systems around the world, 1946âA˘ S¸ 2011." Electoral Studies 32, no. 2 (2013): 360-
369.
JPI Fall 2017, pg. 56