Cultural Distance and Ethnic Civil Conflict

Eleonora Guarnieri

American Economic Review, 2025, vol. 115, issue 4, 1338-68

Abstract: Ethnically diverse countries are more prone to conflict, but why do some groups engage in conflict, while others do not? I show that civil conflict in Africa is explained by ethnic groups' cultural distance to the central government: an increase in cultural distance, proxied by linguistic distance, increases an ethnicity's propensity to fight over government power. To identify this effect, I leverage within-ethnicity variation in linguistic distance resulting from power transitions between ethnic groups over time. I provide evidence that the effects can be attributed to differences in preferences over both the allocation and the type of public goods.

JEL-codes: D74 H41 J15 N47 O15 O17 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1257/aer.20231087

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