Data and Code for: Cultural Distance and Ethnic Civil Conflict

Ethnically diverse countries are more prone to conflict, but why do some groups engage in conflict while others do not? I show that civil conflict in Africa is explained by ethnic groups’ cultural distance to the central government: an increase in cultural distance, proxied by linguistic distance, increases an ethnicity’s propensity to fight over government power. To identify this effect, I leverage within-ethnicity variation in linguistic distance resulting from power transitions between ethnic groups over time. I provide evidence that the effects can be attributed to differences in preferences over both the allocation and the type of public goods.

族群多元的国家更易爆发国内冲突，但为何部分族群会卷入冲突，而另一部分却不会？本文研究表明，非洲的国内冲突可由各族群与中央政府的文化距离（cultural distance）予以解释：以语言距离（linguistic distance）作为代理变量的文化距离越大，该族群争夺政府权力的冲突倾向就越高。为识别该因果效应，本文借助了随时间推移、族群间权力更迭所带来的单个族群与中央政府间语言距离的组内变动。本文提供的证据显示，该效应可归因于各群体在公共物品的分配方式与供给类型两方面存在的偏好差异。