Competitive Elections, Status Anxieties, and the Relative Strength of Ethnic versus National Identification in Africa

Abstract

Research shows that ethnic identification increases on the eve of competitive elections in Africa, but does it do so at the expense of national solidarities? Do competitive elections exacerbate the negative expressions of strong ethnic attachments - coethnic favoritism, relative status concerns, and social distance to other groups? These questions are important because the latter attitudes and perceptions are linked to a host of ills in democracies. In this paper, I examine how the proximity and competitiveness of national elections influence ingroup favoritism, ethnic groups’ status anxieties, perceived discrimination, and trust in Sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on six rounds of survey data for seventeen countries over fourteen years, I find that national identities diminish in salience relative to ethnic ones as political competition increases, and that this is accompanied by heightened perceptions of ethnically-motivated discrimination, increased status anxieties, and lower levels of both inter-ethnic and generalized trust closer to nationally-competitive elections. Therefore, the electoral cycle strongly influences group anxieties in plural societies where political competition is high, and should be taken into account when designing measures to mitigate ethnic polarization in multi-ethnic states.