Ethnic Structure and Cultural Diversity around the World: A Cross-National Data Set on Ethnic Groups’, paper presented at

Development economists have recently focused on ethnic diversity, or “fractionalization, ” as a possible cause of corruption, political instability, and poor economic performance. Political scientists have argued for years over possible links between ethnic diversity (or structure) and civil violence, democratic stability, and party systems. For its empirical evaluation in a cross-national setting, all such research requires data on ethnic groups across countries. This paper tries to do a better job of conceptually grounding, operationalizing, and constructing a list of ethnic groups across countries than is currently available. After addressing conceptual and practical problems involved in enumerating “ethnic groups, ” I present a list of 820 ethnic groups in 160 countries that made up at least 1 % of country population in the early 1990s. I compare a measure of ethnic fractionalization based on this list with the commonly used fractionalization measure based on the Atlas Narodov Mira (1964). Finally, I construct an index of cultural fractionalization that uses the structural distance between languages as a proxy for the cultural distance between groups in a country. This latter measure may be more appropriate when testing hypotheses that assume that ethnic groups “matter ” because they have diverse preferences and cultural differences that pose obstacles to cooperation.