Designing Democratic Government: Making Institutions Work

4. Ethnic Invention: A New Principle for Insitutional Design in Ethnically Divided Democracies

Chapter 4 ETHNIC INVENTION: A NEW PRINCIPLE FOR INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN IN ETHNICALLY DIVIDED DEMOCRACIES  Kanchan Chandra IS IT A good idea for Rwanda, with its history of violence between Hutus and Tutsis, to stop classifying citizens by ethnicity in its census? Is it appropriate for Nigeria, with its history of ethnic violence, to have a two-party instead of a multiparty system? Is Iraq, with its conflicts between Shias, Sunnis and Kurds, better off with a proportional rather than a first-past-the-post electoral system? Is it appropriate for the United States, with its history of racial conflict between a white majority and an African American minority, to institutionalize majority-minority electoral districts? Should Sri Lanka, with its long-standing civil war between Sinhalas and Tamils, recreate itself as a federal state? We require a general principle of institutional design in ethnically divided democracies to answer these questions. This principle should tell us three things: what the goal of institutional design in ethnically divided democracies should be, the mechanism by which this goal might be achieved, and the institutions which best activate this mechanism. The extensive previous literature on this subject implicitly proposes one of five principles of institutional design: 1. Ethnic banning 2. Ethnic interdependence 3. Ethnic matching 4. Ethnic overrepresentation 5. Ethnic self-government This literature focuses explicitly on institutional prescriptions, such as federalism , or packages of institutions grouped under the label of “consociationalism ” (Lijphart 1977), rather than on the principles that justify the prescriptions . But such prescriptions cannot be evaluated without reference to these principles, which I infer by reading backward from the prescription to the underlying justification. The five principles aim for a common goal—political “inclusion,” loosely defined to mean that the representatives of all significant ethnic categories in a democracy should have a share in political power. They also agree that the mechanism that best realizes this goal is the prevention or containment of ethnic majoritarianism.The differences between the principles are only over the specific institutions that best constrain ethnic majoritarianism. According to the principle of ethnic banning, ethnic majoritarianism can be prevented by eliminating ethnicity as a basis for political action altogether. Eliminating ethnic categories from the official census in Rwanda, for example , may realize the principle of ethnic banning by rendering ethnic identities invisible over the long term. According to the principle of ethnic interdependence , ethnicity should be recognized as a political force, but ethnic majoritarianism can be prevented by forcing representatives of one ethnic category to be accountable to another. Adopting a two-party system in Nigeria, for example, may realize this principle to a greater degree than a multiparty system by making representatives of one category accountable to another within the same organization. According to the principle of ethnic matching, ethnic majoritarianism can be prevented by giving representatives of all ethnic categories political power proportionate to their share of the population. Adopting a proportional electoral system in Iraq, for example, might realize the principle of ethnic matching to a greater degree than a first-past-the-post system. According to the principle of ethnic overrepresentation, ethnic majoritarianism can be prevented by overrepresenting minority ethnic categories . Majority-minority districts in the United States, for example, may realize this principle by giving representative minority categories the opportunity to win more seats at the district level than they would otherwise win, which gives them a greater proportion of legislative seats at the national level than they would have otherwise have. And according to the principle of ethnic self-government, ethnic majoritarianism can be prevented by giving minority ethnic categories as much autonomy as possible. Creating a federal state, for example, in Sri Lanka, which might allow at least a section of the Tamils more control over their own affairs, might express this principle to a greater degree than a centralized framework of governance. 90 DESIGNING DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT ETHNIC INVENTION 91 I propose here a new principle to take as a basis for designing institutions for multi-ethnic democracies: the principle of ethnic invention. The goal that this principle seeks to realize, political inclusion, is the same as that of previous work, although more precisely defined. But the mechanism through which the principle of ethnic invention realizes this goal is different: not to prevent or constrain ethnic majoritarianism, but to encourage the emergence of multiple ethnic majorities. More majorities, in other words, are better than no majorities. This new logic...