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.