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Ethnic Polarization, Ethnic Salience, and Civil War

Department of Political Science, Michigan State University, East Lansing

Dan Miodownik

Departments of Political Science and International Relations, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus

This article examines how the relationship between ethnic polarization and civil war could be moderated by different degrees of ethnic salience. Using an agent-based computational model, we analyze the polarization—conflict relationship when ethnic salience is ``fixed''—high for every member of two nominally rival ethnic groups— and ``variable''—permitted to vary across individuals as a function of relative income. We find that (1) when salience is fixed, conflict onset is twice as high at low levels of polarization compared to when salience is permitted to vary, with the difference decreasing at high levels of polarization; (2) the relationship between conflict onset and the range over which we calculate variable salience is positive and robust for low and moderate levels of polarization; (3) the relationship between polarization and conflict onset is robust even under minority domination, if one holds salience fixed; and (4) holding ethnic salience fixed effectively amplifies the negative effect of polarization on economic performance.

Key Words: ethnicity • polarization • salience • civil war • agent-based model

This version was published on February 1, 2009

Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 53, No. 1, 30-49 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0022002708325945


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