Chandra: Why ethnic parties succeed
Disclaimer. Don't rely on these old notes in lieu of reading the literature, but they can jog your memory. As a grad student long ago, my peers and I collaborated to write and exchange summaries of political science research. I posted them to a wiki-style website. "Wikisum" is now dead but archived here. I cannot vouch for these notes' accuracy, nor can I say who wrote them.
Chandra. 2004. Why ethnic parties succeed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
The Model
- People are motivated by either material or "psychic" (e.g. esteem needs, a la Horowitz) goods, or a combination.
- People are instrumentally rational; they vote for the party that will maximize these goods, not just to express an ethnicity.
- An ethnic group's elites (urban, educated, better off) desire state employment or political office as the best prospect of material advancement (this theory applies to clientelistic democracies).
- This requires that they be close to a political patron.
- Voters in patronage democracies have information constraints that lead voters and politicians to favor co-ethnics.
- Voters: Will support any party that puts elites from their ethnic group in power. Count heads; whichever party has the most elites from your ethnic group is the one that you (sincerely) prefer.
- Elites: Parties with internally competitive advancement do better at attracting an ethnic group's elites. [seems a strange assumption. If it's an ethnic party, does it need to keep attracting elites once it has them?]
- Voters are strategic. They use elite head counts (4a, above) to form sincere preferences, then use headcounts of their co-ethnic voters to adjust these preferences according to strategic voting.
