Ethnic diversity has long been thought to be hardly, if at all, compatible with political stability; ethnic loyalties are assumed to be incompatible with the national loyalty deemed necessary for political stability. Increasingly, the generality of this argument has been put into doubt and recent research has given rise to the question whether both sub-national, ethnic and national loyalties may exist and be salient at the same time. The proposed paper argues that research on the link between ethnic and national collective identity needs to distinguish, first, between the social and political national collective and, second, between support for the political community and the political system. This theoretical argument is supported through the empirical examination of the Bolivian case, a country which has recently experienced changes in both the social and political spheres. A historical analysis of the macro-level processes is contrasted with an examination of the dynamics at the micro-level, that is, the identifications and political attitudes of Bolivians. To this aim, the paper examines representative time-series survey data collected by the Latin American Public Opinion Project in bi-yearly intervals between 1998 and 2010. Focusing on the link between ethnic identification, national identification, support for the political collective, as well as support for the political system, the paper shows that these variables respond differently to different political processes.
