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Ethnicity on the Sleeve and Class in the Heart

When do People Respond to Identity and Material Interests?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2013

Daniel Corstange
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Abstract

Are voting rights a class or an ethnic issue? They are both in the diverse societies of the developing world, yet the salience of ethnicity in public discourse frequently compels people to articulate identity demands that may be inconsistent with their material interests, particularly among the rich. This article examines these ideas with an augmented list experiment about illiterate voting rights in Lebanon. Consistent with received wisdom, direct questions yield identity-based answers in which Shiites are more supportive of voting rights than are Sunnis or Christians. Unobtrusive questions, in contrast, yield answers about material deprivation in which poor people are more supportive of illiterate voting than are rich people. The divergence between public statements and private preferences helps to reconcile theoretical predictions that people respond to material incentives with empirical findings that they pursue identity interests.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 889 - 914
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University (email: [email protected]).

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