Ethnic Voters and Non-Ethnic Parties: Evidence from Bosnia-Herzegovina

While much scholarly attention has been paid to whether institutions encourage or discourage ethnic mobilization, many of these theories leave little room for the choices of individual voters and thus risk being overly deterministic. This paper seeks to define a rough theory that allows for individual voters to have varying preferences over the provision of public goods along ethnic or non-ethnic lines. The theory is tested against data from voting records in the 2006 General Elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I argue that the wide variation in voting for ethnic parties and non-ethnic ideological parties is best explained by voters making strategic decisions not only with regards to preferences over targeted benefits towards their own ethnic groups, but also to avoid expropriation by rival ethnic groups. There is wide scholarly consensus that institutions shape the nature of political conflict in ethnically divided societies. Starting with the seminal debate between advocates of consociational and majoritarian electoral systems, researchers have explored in-depth the types of institutions that can increase or decrease the likelihood of ethnic political mobilization, or, more fundamentally, encourage ethnic cleavages to take on political salience within a society over some other social division. These approaches have been immensely fruitful and valuable, but in their emphasis on institutional factors they have downplayed the role of individual preferences and strategic decision making when choosing whether or not to engage in political activity along ethnic lines. This has had two important consequences. The first is that ongoing debates in the literature are often the result of presumed and untested assumptions about the way individuals incorporate their ethnic identity into political action. The other is that general theories of ethnic