Cultural Distance and Ethnic Civil Conflict
American Economic Review · 2025 · Volume 115 · Issue 4
Abstract
Ethnically diverse countries are more prone to conflict, but why do some groups engage in conflict, while others do not? I show that civil conflict in Africa is explained by ethnic groups' cultural distance to the central government: an increase in cultural distance, proxied by linguistic distance, increases an ethnicity's propensity to fight over government power. To identify this effect, I leverage within-ethnicity variation in linguistic distance resulting from power transitions between ethnic groups over time. I provide evidence that the effects can be attributed to differences in preferences over both the allocation and the type of public goods.
Keywords
Conflict, Conflict Resolution, Alliances, Revolutions, Public Goods, Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants, Non-labor Discrimination, Economic History: Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation: Africa, Oceania, Economic Development: Human Resources, Human Development, Income Distribution, Migration, Formal and Informal Sectors, Shadow Economy, Institutional Arrangements, Economic Sociology, Economic Anthropology, Language, Social and Economic Stratification
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