Why ethnic politics and ‘pork’ tend to go together

does not reflect all the valuable comments I received from conference participants; the next draft hopefully will. 1 Coalitions aimed at the capture of political “pork ” have a strong incentive to limit their size in order not to dilute each winner’s share of the spoils. This means that a criterion is needed to distinguish losers from winners so they can be excluded from entry into the winners ’ coalition. In mass politics, the ascriptive mark of ethnicity serves this purpose much better than marks or criteria that can be chosen by anyone who wants access to the pork, such as party affiliation or ideological beliefs. If pork is dispensed on the basis of a criterion that can be chosen or readily altered, then the winning coalition will rapidly expand. Thus, the politics of pork favors coalitions based on features not easily chosen or changed by individuals, among which ascriptive criteria such as ethnicity are leading candidates. The paper develops this simple idea, showing how it may help explain why political coalitions in some many countries are based on ethnicity, and what explains variation in the political salience of ethnicity across countries and over time.