Doctoral Dissertation Research: Why Do Ethnic Parties Flourish or Die?

种族政党- -即主张某一特定身份群体利益的政党- -是世界各地民主国家普遍存在的，而且往往有问题的特点。种族问题的政治化会加深基于身份的分歧，引发种族间冲突，并削弱政府的问责制。鉴于这些显著的负面影响，我们有必要问：为什么一些少数民族政党成功地动员了他们的目标民族人口，而另一些则失败了？本项目通过研究巴基斯坦卡拉奇的案例来解决这个问题，卡拉奇是世界上最大、最多样化的特大城市之一，也是一个地方性种族冲突的场所。特别地，它将比较卡拉奇两个最大的民族- -穆哈吉尔族和普什图族- -的政治行为，以便发展和检验一个民族政党成败的理论。与现有的方法相比，这种方法认真地考虑了群体特定的信仰和规范是身份政治化的重要驱动因素。根据在卡拉奇三次实地考察中收集的大量定性数据，该项目将少数民族政党的集体投票概念化为协调问题。当同种族的人——通常是由于遭受共同的打击——开始相信(1)他们的政治命运是“联系在一起的”，(2)他们的民族政党最有能力为这些联系在一起的利益服务时，这个协调问题就得到了解决。相比之下，现有的民族政治理论主要侧重于对民族投票的工具性解释，虽然有用，但由于理论和实证原因都是不完整的。从理论上讲，种族投票的主流解释并没有认真考虑种族之间的差异，实际上忽视了长期以来关于群体规范和社会激励结构发展的社会心理学文献，以及“迄今为止仅限于美国政治”的小型早期文献，这些文献认识到种族间政治理解和行为异质性的重要性。从经验上看，这项工作使现有的争论超越了几乎只关注非洲和印度。社会科学家选择的案例会影响他们得到的答案，这使得将文献扩展到特定区域之外的研究成为一项关键任务。最后，这个项目纠正了文献中关注农村地区的经验倾向：随着世界快速城市化，身份政治的研究必须特别关注种族在不同大都市中的政治表现。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Ethnic political parties - i.e., parties that advocate for the interests of a particular identity group - are a pervasive and often problematic feature of democracies around the world. The politicization of ethnicity can deepen identity-based divisions, cause interethnic conflict, and undermine government accountability. Given these significant negative consequences, it is important to ask: Why do some ethnic parties succeed in mobilizing their target co-ethnic population, whereas others fail? This project tackles this question through studying the case of Karachi, Pakistan - one of the world's largest and most diverse megacities, and a site of endemic ethnic conflict. In particular, it will compare the political behavior of the two largest ethnic groups in Karachi - the Muhajirs and the Pashtuns - in order to develop and test a theory of ethnic party success and failure. In contrast to existing approaches, this approach takes seriously the idea that group-specific beliefs and norms are an important driver of the politicization of identity.Based upon extensive qualitative data collected through three field trips to Karachi, this project conceptualizes bloc-voting for an ethnic party as a coordination problem. This coordination problem is solved when co-ethnics come to share -- often as a result of suffering a common shock - - the belief that (1) their political fates are 'linked' and (2) their ethnic party is best able to serve these linked interests. By contrast, existing theories of ethnic politics are heavily focused on instrumental explanations of ethnic voting that, while useful, are incomplete for both theoretical and empirical reasons. Theoretically, dominant accounts of ethnic voting do not take seriously differences between ethnic groups, in effect disregarding a longstanding social psychology literature on the development of group norms and social incentive structures, and a small incipient literature " limited so far to American Politics " that recognizes the importance of heterogeneity in political understandings and behaviors across ethnic. Empirically, this work moves existing debates beyond an almost exclusive focus on Africa and India. The cases social scientists choose affect the answers they get, which makes extending the literature beyond the study of particular regions a critical undertaking . Finally, this project corrects the literature's tendency to focus empirically on rural areas: as the world rapidly urbanizes, the study of identity politics must pay special attention to how ethnicity manifests politically in diverse metropolises.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.