Does power-sharing reduce or increase ethnic salience? Drawing on social psychology, I identify two countervailing mechanisms that help reconcile previously opposed findings. First, prolonged power-sharing practices attenuate between-group inequalities. Thereby, they gradually reduce the usefulness of ethnic identities as ‘rules of thumb’ and decrease their salience. Second, extended periods during which individuals live under ethnically differentiated power-sharing institutions render ethnic identities more accessible and thereby increase their salience. To test these expectations, I rely on the most extensive collection of mass surveys used in the empirical literature on ethnic salience so far, encompassing more than 900,000 respondents from a total of 132 countries. I show that power-sharing affects individuals’ self-identification and vote intentions in accordance with my arguments. As my findings are based on specifications that incorporate fixed effects at the group- and group-year levels, they are unlikely to be endogenous to the provision of power-sharing to groups whose identities are most salient in the first place. My findings have important implications for efforts to institutionalize peace in divided societies and for the literature on ethnic conflict.

中文翻译：

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权力分享对种族显着性的长期影响


权力分享会减少还是增加种族显着性？根据社会心理学，我确定了两种抵消机制，有助于调和先前相反的发现。首先，长期的权力分享做法削弱了群体之间的不平等。因此，他们逐渐降低了种族身份作为“经验法则”的用处，并降低了其显着性。其次，个人长期生活在种族差异化的权力分享机构之下，使得种族身份更容易被人理解，从而增强其显着性。为了检验这些预期，我依靠迄今为止关于种族显着性的实证文献中使用的最广泛的大规模调查收集，涵盖了来自 132 个国家的超过 900,000 名受访者。根据我的论点，我表明权力分享会影响个人的自我认同和投票意图。由于我的研究结果基于包含群体和群体年份水平的固定效应的规范，因此它们不太可能内生于向身份最突出的群体提供权力共享。我的发现对于在分裂社会中实现和平制度化的努力以及有关种族冲突的文献具有重要意义。