Ethnic Parties in Africa: Origins and Impact

Under what conditions do ethnic parties emerge? And do they necessarily breed civil conflict? This paper makes two important contributions to the study of ethnic politics. First, theoretically, it develops a twofold conceptualization of ethnic mobilization, focusing on both electoral politics and the politically oriented civil society. Second, it builds on novel empirical data to test its arguments. I argue that ethnic mobilization in electoral politics is driven by two crucial factors: the interplay of the electoral system with ethnic groups’ geographical concentration, and the degree of the ethnicization of civil society. Majoritarian electoral systems, coupled with high geographical concentration, should facilitate the electoral mobilization of ethnic groups. On the other hand, non-/trans-ethnic civil society organizations may serve as a bulwark against the ethnicization of politics by bringing different socio-political interests to the fore. A strong non-ethnic civil society should therefore moderate ethnic mobilization. Thus, by taking into account the influence of non-party political organizations, this study will go beyond previous quantitative studies on ethnicity in electoral politics. Furthermore, existing studies have either been constrained to cross-sectional analyses or have focused exclusively on countries with electorally active ethnic groups when analyzing conflict risk – thereby ignoring systems without ethnic parties. In order to overcome these shortcomings, this paper draws on new data on ethnic parties, ethnic settlement patterns, and ethnic/non-ethnic civil society organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1990 to 2009 to explain the emergence of ethnic parties. In a second step, ethnic parties’ impact on the risk of ethnic conflict is tested. Sub-Saharan Africa is a particularly interesting region for such a study since its states are characterized by high ethnic heterogeneity which has been shown to be positively correlated with the degree of ethnic voting.