How States Create Electoral Cleavages: Government Policies and Ethnic Cleavage Formation
In my book manuscript, I offer a novel explanation for the formation of ethnic electoral cleavages as the result of government policies. Although theories of ethnic politics expect ethnic parties to emerge where there is ethnic diversity, evidence from around the world points to a weak empirical relationship between ethnic diversity and the electoral success of ethnic parties. Building on this puzzle, my book asks when do voters begin to prioritize ethnic identities that have not been previously mobilized and when do voters begin to form new coalitions based on these identities. Often, scholars of ethnic politics focus on the strategic initiatives of political elites to explain when identity becomes a dimension of party competition, while theories of electoral cleavages expect voters to routinely choose from a set of pre-existing salient identities. My book builds and expands on this long-standing literature and offers a new explanation that diverges from elite-driven explanations and instead focuses on the responses of voters to government policies.
The book offers a new theory that highlights the impact of government policies on the political relevance of identities in party competition. When government policies aggrieve voters because of their identity, policies make identities politically relevant, increase group cohesion, and provide incentives for the aggrieved voters to coordinate against the policies. The electoral potential of the emerging voter coalition produces strong incentives for political entrepreneurs to develop a platform that protects the group’s interests and organize voters around the aggrieved identity. The book offers the novel explanation that voters can drive the formation of a new ethnic dimension of party competition in response to policies. It provides a new way of thinking of cleavage formation as a policy feedback effect, where government policies shape mass preferences and change the structure of party systems.
I use a range of methods to test this theory, including regression analysis of original datasets using detailed micro-level data, process-tracing based on sources in multiple languages that I collected during fieldwork and from online archives, and matched comparisons of case studies within and across five countries: 19th century Prussia, Baden, and Bavaria, mid-20th century Belgium, and late 20th century Israel. In the majority of the case studies, which span religious, linguistic, and cultural identities, the policies were not designed instrumentally to initiate a new electoral cleavage nor were they based on a pre-existing electoral cleavage. In all the case studies, voters began to coordinate on their shared identity only when they were aggrieved by government policies. Moreover, I show that the aggrieved groups became socially cohesive and organizationally dense in response to the policies, and that this happened before the formation of the new ethnic parties. The book has implications for research on ethnic politics, party system formation and change, religion and politics, and regionalism.
Maayan Mor 