The Politics and Economics of Official Ethnic Discrimination: A Global Statistical Analysis, 1950–2003

It is argued that ethnic competition, triggers for ethnic mobilization, and political institutions together affect changes in government-imposed political and economic restrictions on ethnic groups worldwide. Due to the fact that the only existing comparative data set on ethnic discrimination, produced by the Minorities at Risk project, uses discrimination as a criterion for including ethnic groups, a new data set of 620 additional groups has been created to predict the selection process through a full-information, maximum-likelihood Heckman probit model, but selection bias is found not to affect the results. Discrimination is modeled as a dynamic Markov process, and central and regional government institutions, economic conditions, and minority group characteristics are found to influence the initiation and continuation of discriminatory policies.