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Elite Responses to Ethnic Diversity and Interethnic Contact

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Abstract

Do politicians who work alongside an ethnically diverse group of political elites improve their views toward ethnic outgroups? Political elites serve critical roles as elected representatives and public figures, but we do not know whether the act of political elites working together in an ethnically diverse environment impacts how they view ethnic outgroups. I argue that political elites work in a competitive environment wherein increased ethnic diversity can promote ethnic animosity and worsen outgroup views. However, elites share interests in maximizing resource distribution, which can lead to positive interethnic contact, improving outgroup views. I test these arguments by collecting original data from municipal government committee members in India. I show that elite outgroup views shift only to a limited extent in response to either increased committee diversity or engaging in interethnic contact. While interethnic contact shows the most promise for improving outgroup views, neither diversity nor contact alone seem to be solutions to intra-elite ethnic animosity.

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Notes

  1. Respondent 7. 2020. Interviewed by Author. Chennai. Replication data and code for the quantitative analysis are available at the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JQKIFP.

  2. Importantly, gridlock might prompt committee members to engage in interethnic contact (e.g., Posner, 2004), but this section of the theoretical argument is examining the impact of increasing ethnic diversity without changing the level of interethnic contact. Indeed, the section about interethnic contact argues that contact shows committee members that they can and need to work together to achieve similar political aims.

  3. Elite cooperation may be explicitly referenced, but without such qualifiers, mentioning ethnicity should distinguish the in and outgroup.

  4. Improved attitudes toward outgroups may themselves consist of improved affect toward outgroups, a possibility I consider further in SI.4.

  5. I define the ethnic majority as forward caste members, whereas non-forward castes and members of other religions are ethnic minority groups.

  6. This committee is sometimes called the executive committee.

  7. Respondents 2 and 3. 2019. Interviewed by Author. Delhi.

  8. Respondent 15. 2020. Interviewed by Author. Delhi.

  9. Respondent 5. 2019. Interviewed by Author. Delhi.

  10. Respondent 14. 2020. Interviewed by Author. Delhi.

  11. Respondent 7. 2020. Interviewed by Author. Chennai.

  12. Respondent 6. 2019. Interviewed by Author. Chennai.

  13. Respondent 15. 2020. Interviewed by Author. Delhi.

  14. Respondent 12. 2020. Interviewed by Author. Delhi.

  15. Number of committees multiplied by members per committee.

  16. In addition to my own fieldwork, Morsel Research and Development undertook the data collection and fielded the survey experiment between November 2019 and June 2020.

  17. The full data collection and experimental protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board #201910066 and was registered with EGAP. See Supplemental Information (SI) 1 for question wording.

  18. It is possible that some corporations intentionally choose not to constitute committees because of longstanding ethnic animosity. Lack of strong local political leadership is the most likely explanation for missing corporation committees.

  19. See SI.6.

  20. In keeping with colloquial usage, I refer to varnas as castes.

  21. Some committees do actually have only a single member. Committees with only one or two members were excluded.

  22. The experiment has sufficient power to detect small effect sizes.

  23. Corporators belonging to more than one committee were asked about a single committee (see SI.2).

  24. The survey text was prepared in English and translated by a Hindi professor who identified problematic words, phrases, and concepts. Translation discrepancies were rectified so that questionnaires had the same meaning across languages.

  25. Respondent 5. 2019. Interviewed by Author. Delhi.

  26. I am interested in the absolute amount of contact with outgroup elites, not the relative comparison between in and outgroup elite contact because my argument is about the total amount of outgroup elite contact.

  27. Only survey respondents who were asked about their contact with at least one outgroup corporator were included in the analysis.

  28. SI.3 contains randomization and balance checks.

  29. Recall that these models use corporation fixed effects to control for the overall level of ethnic diversity in the corporation.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Manisha Awasthi, Umang Srivastava, and Morsel Research and Development for fielding the survey experiment. Nivedita Mehta, Adarsh S., and Madhavi Verma provided invaluable assistance with name classification. I also thank Deniz Aksoy, Alana Bame, Rikhil Bhavnani, Pratim Biswas, Ana Bracic, Josh Gubler, Sunita Parikh, Guillermo Rosas, Margit Tavits, and many Indian interview participants.

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The Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy provided funding for this project.

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  1. School of History and Social Science, Louisiana Tech University, 1308 West Railroad Avenue, Ruston, LA, 71272, USA

    William O’Brochta

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O’Brochta, W. Elite Responses to Ethnic Diversity and Interethnic Contact. Polit Behav (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09859-w

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