The Theory and Practice of Ethnic Politics: How What We Know about Ethnic Identity Can Make Democratic Theory Better.

In the past decade, scholars have increasingly shifted some of the attention given to ethnic politics from discussions of conflict and peacemaking to discussions of how to make ethnically divided societies more democratic. In most cases, democratic theorists, in making their normative recommendations, have not taken into account everything we know about how ethnic identity and ethnic politics work in the real world. This failure to incorporate our empirical knowledge about ethnic politics takes two forms: first, theory has often been rooted too firmly in the contexts of specific countries, usually the countries the scholars are most familiar with; second, theory has seldom given more than lip service to the fact that identities change over time, but instead has treated those identities, and the boundaries between them, as essentially fixed. While much ink has been spilled on the conflict between empowering minority ethnic groups and protecting the individual freedoms of the members of those groups, the specific recommendations for accomplishing either of these goals tend to grow out of specific times and places. This cultural context may be explicit, as when Will Kymlicka uses Canadian examples to illustrate the different sorts of ethnic groups that can exist and the different rights that should be accorded to each, or the context may be implicit, as when American political theorists model the participation of minority groups in democratic politics generally on the ways in which minorities have historically participated in the American political system. In reality, how members of ethnic groups participate in politics­democratic or otherwise­will be determined by a whole range of factors, such as the history and culture of a country, the size of a minority relative to the majority, the strengths of the identities in question, and the possibility of alternate identities that lay claim on individuals' loyalties. For example, a minority group that votes as a bloc is something of a curiosity when it makes up 1% of the population of a state, but an existential threat to democracy when it makes up 40%. One of these factors which is most often overlooked is the degree to which ethnic identity is dynamic and even malleable: identities can sharpen or fade over time, and under some circumstances groups can combine or split up. Knowing this, we should consider not only the impact that our solutions will have in the present, but also the ways in which they will affect the evolution of identities in the future. For example, if we see some prospect that two competing groups can develop a common identity that renders their erstwhile conflict moot, we would want to make sure not to suggest measures that would prevent that evolution from occurring, or even push the development of identities in the opposite direction. Of course, one short paper cannot by itself do all of the work of bringing empirical reality into the democratic theory of ethnic politics. However, I hope that I can provide a framework that will make that task possible. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]