In Professor Horowitz’s rejoinders (2004, 2006) to Fraenkel and Grofman (2004, 2006a), he mischaracterizes our formal results, retreats from previous claims about the conditions for the alternative vote electoral system to generate centripetal outcomes, renders explicit his dubious assumptions about voter behavior in divided societies, and greatly exaggerates the global evidence in support of p...

The fighting in some civil wars primarily takes place in a few stable locations, while the fighting in others moves substantially. We posit that rebel groups that do not primarily fight for a specific ethnic group, that receive outside military assistance, or that have relatively weak fighting capacity tend to fight in inconsistent locations. We develop new measures of conflict zone movement to...

Presented as part of the " Comparative Politics Workshop " speaker series at the Equality Development and Globalization Studies (EDGS) program at Northwestern University, with generous support from the Rajawali Foundation. ABSTRACT Since the restoration of multiparty competition in the country in the early 1990s, three of Kenya's five presidential elections—1992, 1997, and 2007—have been accomp...

Abstract Prevailing theories of democracy focus on class conflict. In contrast, we study democratic transition when ethnic tensions are more salient than the poor/rich divide, building a model where (i) groups negotiate about allocating economic surplus and (ii) military political mobilizations rest unobserved strength attachment. Free fair elections elicit information restore inter-ethnic barg...

Terrain is central to understanding why some countries have contentious ethnic divisions, while others do not. We argue that access to variable rugged terrain facilitated the development and survival of more distinct ethnic groups, even in the face of government repression. We show that the persistence of greater ethnic diversity in highly variable rugged areas as well as these ethnic groups te...

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-ethn...

Affirmative action, or positive discrimination favouring the members of marginalized populations, is a key policy approach for addressing group-based inequalities along ethnic, religious, and racial lines (e.g. horizontal inequalities). It adopted in dozens countries around world areas of, instance, university enrolment, public employment, political representation as corrective social justice m...

Clinicians are increasingly aware that a single technique for individual or family counseling is inappropriate in an ethnically complex society. All clients in counseling seek relief for their distress, but, as Mayo (1991:318) has pointed out, "The paths to that goal are many." Consequently, several works clarify the characteristics of different social and cultural groups, particularly with ref...