Ethnic Polarization, Ethnic Salience, and Civil War
Ravi Bhavnani (Michigan State University)
This article examines how the relationship between ethnic polarization and civil war could be moderated by different degrees of ethnic salience. We use an agent-based computational model to analyze the polarization-conflict relationship when ethnicity is "fixed" and salient for all members of rival ethic groups and when ethnic salience is "variable" -- permitted to vary across individuals within groups as a function of relative income. We test this relationship at both low and high levels of ethnic polarization. We then explore the sensitivity of our results to intermediate levels of polarization, the range over which relative income calculations that determine ethnic salience are made, and to minority domination. And finally, we analyze the effect of economic policy on conflict at different levels of polarization, under both fixed and variable measures of ethnic salience. Our results indicate that: (i) when ethnic salience is fixed, conflict onset is more than twice as high as at low levels of polarization, with the difference decreasing at high levels of polarization; (ii) the relationship between conflict onset and the per-capita range over which we calculate variable ethnic salience is positive and robust for low and moderate levels of ethnic polarization; (iii) the relationship between polarization and conflict onset is robust even under minority domination, if one holds ethnic salience fixed; and (iv) in contrast to the assertion that polarization is likely to have an indirect effect on economic performance which runs through conflict, the effect could run from economic policy to performance and conflict, moderated instead by different degrees of polarization. We offer a partial test of our argument, using data from rounds 1 and 2 of the Afrobarometer Survey to: (i) illustrate variation in ethnic salience across individuals; and (ii) underscore the incongruity between measures of polarization, fractionalization, and salience.