Ethnolinguistic Fractionalization is not Enough to Explain Ethnic Politics: Evidence from Benin and Senegal

We show that cultural and ethnolinguistic diversity on their own are not enough to describe ethnic political organization, but that co-ethnics need to reliably use ethnicity as a signal of cultural alignment. Using Benin and Senegal as a case study, we show that the overlap between cultural fractionalization and ethnolinguistic fractionalization in the two countries are statistically different from one another. Evidence from 2000 simulations and the Komolgrov-Smirnov test suggests that the degree to which cultural and ethnolinguistic diversity overlap serves as a first step in explaining why we observe political organization around ethnicity in Benin and not in Senegal--even though the two have statistically indistinguishable levels of ethnolinguistic and cultural diversity. This work informs the broader question of why ethnic politics emerge in some ethnically diverse settings and not in others.

本研究表明，仅以文化多样性与民族语言多样性本身，不足以阐释族群政治组织（ethnic political organization）的形成逻辑；唯有同族群群体能够稳定地将族群身份作为文化契合度的标识，方可对其进行有效解释。本研究以贝宁与塞内加尔为案例，发现两国的文化碎片化程度（cultural fractionalization）与民族语言碎片化程度（ethnolinguistic fractionalization）的重叠度在统计学层面存在显著差异。通过2000次模拟实验与科尔莫戈罗夫-斯米尔诺夫检验（Komolgrov-Smirnov test）得到的证据显示：尽管贝宁与塞内加尔的民族语言多样性与文化多样性水平在统计学上并无显著差异，但二者的文化与民族语言多样性重叠程度，是解释为何族群政治组织仅在贝宁而非塞内加尔出现的首要动因。本研究为解答‘为何族群政治仅在部分族裔多元的社会中萌生，而非其他社会’这一宏观学术议题提供了重要的理论支撑。