The long-term consequences of power-sharing for ethnic salience

Abstract

Does power-sharing reduce or increase ethnic salience? Drawing on social psychology, I identify two countervailing mechanisms that help reconcile previously opposed findings. First, prolonged power-sharing practices attenuate between-group inequalities. Thereby, they gradually reduce the usefulness of ethnic identities as ‘rules of thumb’ and decrease their salience. Second, extended periods during which individuals live under ethnically differentiated power-sharing institutions render ethnic identities more accessible and thereby increase their salience. To test these expectations, I rely on the most extensive collection of mass surveys used in the empirical literature on ethnic salience so far, encompassing more than 900,000 respondents from a total of 132 countries. I show that power-sharing affects individuals’ self-identification and vote intentions in accordance with my arguments. As my findings are based on specifications that incorporate fixed effects at the group- and group-year levels, they are unlikely to be endogenous to the provision of power-sharing to groups whose identities are most salient in the first place. My findings have important implications for efforts to institutionalize peace in divided societies and for the literature on ethnic conflict.