Chandra/LICEP Short Project/April 2000 1 STRATEGIC VOTING FOR ETHNIC PARTIES

The presumption in the theoretical literature on ethnic mobilization is that voting for ethnic parties is a purely expressive act, driven by strong psychological attachments and not subject to cost-benefit calculations. Models of strategic voting, meanwhile, make no reference to the ethnic identity of voters and parties, and have been developed and applied mainly within post-industrial societies. They have so far not explored whether and to what extent we should expect strategic voting for ethnic parties in democracies in Asia, Africa, and much of the post-communist world. My dissertation, which investigates the question of why ethnic parties succeed, develops an argument that predicts high levels of strategic voting for ethnic parties in “patronage democracies. ” I would like to present this argument at LICEP, and some data investigating it from Scheduled Caste voting patterns in India. I expect to revise the dissertation over the next year, and would like to ask LICEP members for feedback on 1) the specification of the model 2) on evaluating one of the empirical tests that I have performed so far, using Gary King’s Ecological Inference Method 3) on designing further tests and 4) on selecting further cases through which to investigate the argument in a cross-national context