Ethnic Social Institutions

The project seeks to develop a new metric that allows scholars to assess the impact of ethnic social institutions on outcomes such as political participation or local cooperation. Often the role of ethnicity is incorporated into models through metrics like ELF (ethno-linguistic fractionalization) which only provide information on the level of ethnic heterogeneity in an area. The underlying belief is that more heterogeneous areas are more likely to experience more conflict, less cooperation, and poorer outcomes. 

Our early findings suggest that while this general trend holds, 

• we find that how much ethnicity matters to individuals varies greatly across communities, and 

• that in the most extreme localities (those nearly entirely homogeneous or heterogeneous) that this trend much less robust