Ethnic Polarization, Ethnic Salience, and Civil War

Authored by Dan Miodownik

Date Published: 2009-02

DOI: 10.1177/0022002708325945

Sponsors: Department of Political Science and Center for the Advanced Study of International Development at Michigan State University Hebrew University Intramural Research Fund Israeli National Science Foundation

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Flow charts

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

This article examines how the relationship between ethnic polarization and civil war could be moderated by different degrees of ethnic salience. Using an agent-based computational model, we analyze the polarization-conflict relationship when ethnic salience is “fixed”-high for every member of two nominally rival ethnic groups and “variable”-permitted to vary across individuals as a function of relative income. We find that (1) when salience is fixed, conflict onset is twice as high at low levels of polarization compared to when salience is permitted to vary, with the difference decreasing at high levels of polarization; (2) the relationship between conflict onset and the range over which we calculate variable salience is positive and robust for low and moderate levels of polarization; (3) the relationship between polarization and conflict onset is robust even under minority domination, if one holds salience fixed; and (4) holding ethnic salience fixed effectively amplifies the negative effect of polarization on economic performance.

Tags

Agent-based model Salience civil war ethnicity polarization