Ethnicity in Time

• Author: Matthias vom Hau,Prerna Singh
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414016633231
• Published date: 01 September 2016
• Date: 01 September 2016
• Subject Matter: Articles

Comparative Political Studies

2016, Vol. 49(10) 1303 –1340

© The Author(s) 2016

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414016633231

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Article

Ethnicity in Time:

Politics, History, and

the Relationship between

Ethnic Diversity and

Public Goods Provision

Prerna Singh1 and Matthias vom Hau2

Abstract

This article revisits and seeks to challenge one of the most powerful hypotheses

in the political economy scholarship: the supposedly negative relationship

between ethnic diversity and public goods provision. We suggest that the

relative lack of attention to politics and history makes much of this literature

vulnerable to endogeneity problems. In response, we develop a state-centered

approach that brings time and temporality to the analytical foreground. This

approach addresses issues of reverse causality and spuriousness by examining

how different historical trajectories of nation-state formation, and the state

strategies and capabilities to provide public goods associated with each, might

have shaped both contemporary diversity and public goods provision. Bringing

in politics and history and putting the analytical focus on the state also allows the

article to open up the debate around how distinct manifestations of politicized

ethnicity might influence state provision of public goods.

Keywords

ethnicity, public goods, history, nation-building, state formation, comparative

politics, political sociology

1Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

2Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, Barcelona, Spain

Corresponding Author:

Matthias vom Hau, Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, Ciutadella Campus (Universitat

Pompeu Fabra), C. Ramon Trias Fargas, 25-27, Barcelona 08005, Spain.

Email: mvomhau@ibei.org

633231CPSXXX10.1177/0010414016633231Comparative Political StudiesSingh and vom Hau

research-article2016

1304 Comparative Political Studies 49(10)

This article revisits and challenges “one of the most powerful hypotheses in

political economy” (Banerjee, Iyer, & Somanathan, 2005, p. 639), namely,

the negative relationship between ethnic diversity and the provision of public

goods.1 A large and influential body of scholarship has shown that ethnic

diversity impedes the provision of a wide range of public goods across coun-

tries, regions, cities, and communities from sub-Saharan Africa and South

Asia to North America.2 Such has been the “consensus” that ethnic heteroge-

neity dampens public goods provision that scholars working in this research

tradition have now sought to take the “next step” of exploring the micro-

logics of this connection (Habyarimana, Humphreys, Posner, & Weinstein,

2009, p. 5; see also Baldwin & Huber, 2010; Lieberman & McClendon,

2013). And yet, this article, and the special issue it introduces, argues that it

is essential to pause to reexamine the foundations of this scholarship and how

this might provoke a step back from the conventional wisdom.

Specifically, we contend that the case for the so-called “diversity-develop-

ment deficit thesis” is overstated, largely because it has been derived, for the

most part, in isolation from a serious consideration of history and politics. In

fact, a doggedly ahistorical perspective prevails in the political economy

scholarship. The lion’s share of evidence for the diversity-development deficit

thesis comes from studies that use a measure of ethnic diversity constructed

with data from the 1960s (e.g., Alesina, Baqir, & Easterly, 1999; Easterly &

Levine, 1997; La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, & Vishny, 1999) or from

the 1990s (Alesina, Devleeschauwer, Easterly, Kurlat, & Wacziarg, 2003).

This temporally limited focus bears the danger of overlooking the distinct

causal contexts of different time periods (Grzymała-Busse, 2011; Pierson,

2004). More fundamentally, it leads to the treatment of ethnic heterogeneity as

exogenous, similar to variables such as climate or topography. There have

been notable attempts to address problems with the conceptualization and

measurement of ethnicity,3 but the potential endogeneity of ethnic diversity

has been relatively unaddressed and remains, even by the admission of some

of the prominent contributors to the scholarship, an important shortcoming

(Banerjee et al., 2005).4 Could it be that contemporary levels of ethnic diver-

sity are endogenous to historical levels of public goods provision? Or that

contemporary public goods provision is itself a product of prior provision of

goods and services? These questions gain particular urgency in light of a rap-

idly expanding body of work that questions whether the supposedly negative

impact of diversity on public goods provision is really as straightforward and

robust as the political economy scholarship suggests.5

Building on, yet also pushing beyond these “revisionist” findings, we

develop an alternative theoretical approach that examines the relationship

between ethnic diversity and the provision of public goods from a historical

Singh and vom Hau 1305

perspective. We are aware that an assessment of the full impact of history and

politics on the causal relationship between ethnicity and public goods provi-

sion requires close attention to a variety of macro-historical processes,

including, but not limited to, capitalist development and market expansion,

civil society formation, and the legacies of violent conflict and conflict settle-

ment. Yet, in light of the vast scholarship on the unique significance of the

modern state for both public goods provision (e.g., Huber & Stephens, 2001,

2012; Skocpol, 1992) and collective identities (e.g., Laitin, 1986; Lieberman

& Singh, 2012; Marx, 1998; Wimmer, 2002), this article focuses on the state,

and, in particular, on patterns of nation-building and state institutional

development.

Most studies that show a negative relationship between ethnic diversity

and public services emphasize provision via local communities (e.g., Algan,

Hémet, & Laitin, 2011; Bardhan, 2000; Fearon & Laitin, 1996; Khwaja,

2009; Miguel & Gugerty, 2005). Although collective action by communities

is clearly important, an excessively narrow focus on communities stands at

odds with the global historical reality of public goods provision. Across most

parts of the world, the provision of public services has been, and remains,

primarily the responsibility of the state. This has recently been recognized

even within the political economy scholarship itself.6 Moreover, a large social

science literature on welfare states highlights the truly dramatic (yet uneven)

historical rise and expansion of state-sponsored public infrastructure and

social services across the globe over the last 150 years.7

Similarly, a significant body of work in sociology and political science has

shown that, to a much greater degree than local communities, states have the

power to create or modify patterns of ethnicity over time. For example, ethnic

categories used in censuses and official identity documents often make what

they appear to reflect, eventually turning into sources of self-identification and

bases of collective mobilization (Lieberman and Singh, 2015; Loveman, 2014;

Nagel, 1995; Nobles, 2000; Torpey, 2000). Similarly, public schools constitute

a powerful institution through which states engender or change ethnic divisions

and national attachments (Gellner, 1983; vom Hau, 2009; E. Weber, 1976).

This article builds on this scholarship by putting the analytical focus

squarely on the state and studying its relationship to ethnicity explicitly over

time. In doing so, we push away and forward from the conventional wisdom

in two main ways. First off, we argue that past state intentions and capabilities

to provide public goods shape both contemporary patterns of ethnic diversity

and state provision of public services. We also suggest that the relationship

between diversity and state provision of public goods looks different when

we extend our analytical lens back in time and investigate

the relationship in different temporal contexts. A state-centered analytical