Exit over Voice in Dominican Ethnoracial Politics

This article examines the effect of perceived ethnoracial identity on electoral politics in the Dominican Republic and provides an explanation for the low salience of race and ethnicity in political behavior in Latin America. I argue that, under certain conditions, individuals will deal with ethnoracial discrimination and stratification through exit rather than voice—that is, they will reclassify their way out of marginalized ethno-racial categories instead of voting for candidates or parties that share their ethnoracial identities. This tends to be the case where ethnoracial group identity is inchoate and group boundaries are permeable. I also argue that where ethnoracial group loyalties are weak and immigration is widespread, citizens may emphasize national origin over race or ethnicity. Findings from an original field experiment and survey in Santo Domingo show that candidates did not consistently support candidates that shared their ethno-racial attributes, but they did slightly favor candidates perceived as white. Respondents strongly discriminated against candidates of Haitian origin.

Este artículo examina el efecto que ejerce la percepción de identidad etno-racial en el comportamiento político en la República Dominicana e intenta explicar la baja incidencia de la identidad etno-racial en la política electoral en América Latina. Se argumenta que en sociedades en las que los límites de clasificación etno-racial son porosos y donde los grupos etno-raciales carecen de identidades consolidadas hay una tendencia hacia evadir identificación con grupos marginados en vez de participar en política de tilde etno-racial que afronte niveles de estratificación social. Los resultados de una encuesta y de un experimento de campo realizados en Santo Domingo, República Dominicana indican que, conforme a la tesis que se avanza, los atributos etno-raciales inciden poco en la evaluación de candidatos, salvo en la evaluación de candidatos de origen haitiano.