Ethnic Groups' Access to State Power and Group Size
Hector Galindo-Silva
TL;DR
This paper addresses why ethnic groups gain access to state power by documenting a global inverted-U relationship between a group's relative size and access to central executive power across 575 groups in 181 countries from 1946 to 2021. It combines a comprehensive empirical strategy—using the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset and Polity V indicators, with fixed effects, lagged-size, and IV approaches—with a simple two-period model that frames the trade-off between conflict risk from exclusion and rent dilution from inclusion. The key finding is that intermediate-sized groups (~$0.40$ of the population) enjoy the highest likelihood of political inclusion, a pattern strongest in historically open institutional settings and weaker in persistent, exclusionary contexts. The study contributes to the literatures on ethnic politics and institutional persistence and has policy implications for designing power-sharing mechanisms that translate formal inclusion into real influence.
Abstract
Ethnic-based political inequality is widespread, yet its underlying drivers remain poorly understood. This paper shows that an ethnic group's relative size is a key correlate of its access to central executive power. Using data on 575 groups across 181 countries from 1946 to 2021, I document a robust inverted-U-shaped relationship: groups of intermediate size are significantly more likely to gain political inclusion than both very small and very large ones. A simple model explains this pattern as the result of elite trade-offs between the risks of conflict from exclusion and the costs of sharing political rents. The model further predicts-and the data confirm-that the inverted-U is most pronounced in countries with historically competitive institutions. These findings offer new insight into the joint role of ethnic composition and institutions in shaping patterns of ethnic political inclusion.