Crosscutting cleavages and ethno-communal violence: Evidence from Indonesia in the post-Suharto era

Recent literature has shown that crosscutting social cleavages reduce the likelihood of civil war. This article argues that the same logic does not apply to lower-scale group violence such as riots, which differ in such a way that crosscutting social cleavages should often have the opposite effect, increasing both the frequency and scale of riots. We test this argument by analysing Muslim-Christian violence in the post-Suharto era, combining a new subnational data set of ethno-income and ethnogeographic crosscuttingness with a new and comprehensive subnational data set of violence in Indonesia. Our findings suggest that high ethno-income crosscuttingness, when combined with a high degree of urban anonymity and close living quarters, is a potent setting for inter-group communal violence. We conclude with a discussion of how context matters in understanding the effect of macrostructural variables such as crosscuttingness on violence

Replication data for: CROSS-CUTTINGNESS, CLEAVAGE STRUCTURES AND CIVIL WAR ONSET

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Constitutions, Cleavages and Coordination: A Socio-Institutional Theory of Public Goods Provision.

Why do some developing democracies outperform others in the provision of health and education? This dissertation explores a socio-institutional theory of why politicians choose to allocate resources either broadly across their country, or to narrow societal groups, be they ethnic-, religious-, class-, or regional-based. Relying on a mixed-methods research design, this dissertation first analyzes two countries with similar electoral rules, but vastly different social structures—Thailand (ethnically homogenous) and Mauritius (ethnically diverse). From this qualitative analysis, the dissertation develops a general theory and tests it, using original data on ethno-income and ethno-geographic cross-cuttingness, on health outcomes and spending categories in 43 developing democracies. The dissertation finds that ethnic diversity does not necessarily lead to under-provision of public goods. Appropriately designed electoral rules can lead to the creation of broad, national coalitions that allocate resources to the nation at large rather than to the ethnic group(s) of the government. Second, no single type of electoral rule is necessarily harmful to public goods provision; rather, depending on the type of society in which they operate, PR and majoritarianism can be beneficial or detrimental.Ph.D.Political ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/63794/1/jselway_1.pd