Cultural Distance and Ethnic Civil Conflict

Eleonora Guarnieri

No 10609, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

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 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.

Keywords: ethnic civil war; culture; linguistic distance; Africa; Bantu expansion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 O55 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-dev and nep-evo
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10609

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