Ethnic Identity, Collective Action, and Conflict:
An Experimental Approach
Macartan Humphreys1, Daniel N. Posner2 and Jeremy M. Weinstein1
Paper prepared for Presentation at APSA, Boston, September 2002
ABSTRACT
Theories of ethnic mobilization and conflict tend to assume that political
actors are easily able to place other actors into their “correct” ethnic
categories. While this may be the case for some individuals and some
categories, it is not always so. We argue that this variation, although typically
ignored, has implications for theoretical, empirical, and policy-oriented
research on ethnic cooperation and conflict. In this paper we propose the
use of experimental methods to collect data regarding how the information
actors have about the identities of others varies within a polity. We describe
an experiment that provides insight into the individual and group-level
determinants of ethnic “identifiability” – that is, on how well, and under
what conditions, actors can correctly identify the ethnic backgrounds of
others. We also demonstrate how the information gathered in this
experiment informs a second set of experiments that enable us to distinguish
between rival explanations for the relationship between ethnicity and
collective action.
The experiment described in this paper will be conducted in Uganda in July-
August 2003, with a trial run taking place in the U.S. in November 2002. We
welcome all suggestions, theoretical and practical to help improve our
research design.
We wish to thank Kanchan Chandra for comments on an earlier draft of this paper and David Laitin for clever
suggestions for reshaping the experimental design.
1 Center for International Development, Harvard University.
2 Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles.
1
INTRODUCTION
Ethnic identities are widely seen as facilitating and sometimes inducing violent conflict. By
one account, conflicts over