Ethnic Identity and Democratic Institutions: A Dynamic Perspective

Ethnic Identity and Democratic Institutions: A Dynamic Perspective

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The most urgent problem in the design of democratic institutions today is how best to design such institutions in the midst of seemingly profound internal heterogeneity, conflict, and group differences. In different parts of the world, the relevant differences can be religious, racial, linguistic, tribal, cultural, regional, or perhaps of other forms (as a shorthand, “ethnic differences”). This problem is central, not only to newly forming democracies over the last generation but also to more established democracies, as various groups more assertively press claims for political recognition, representation, and influence. We ought to understand this issue, better than we have thus far, as lying at the intersection of democratic theory and democratic institutional design on the one hand, and questions about the nature of individual rationality and rational choice concerning ethnic group “identities”, on the other. The argument of this chapter is that academic thought and, for the most part, practical institutional design have thus far taken too static an approach to this fundamental problem. In our first phase of confrontation with this issue, theorists and institutional designers have been overwhelmed with the problem as it appears at particularly critical political moments: the moment of state formation; or the moment at which societies emerge from conflict; or the moment at which group demands for inclusion, recognition, and power first become powerfully enough expressed as to require an institutional response. These are the moments at which ethnic identities are likely to seem most fixed, most entrenched, most essential to conceptions of self, and potentially most divisive or explosive. Dominated by the urgency of these tensions at the moment of institutional formation, constitutional framers often respond to the problem as it presents itself at that moment. As a result, the implicit view embodied in the institutions they create is frequently a static one. The institutional perspective takes for granted the nature of these ethnic identities and conflicts as they exist at the moment a state’s democratic institutions are forged. In contemporary contexts, the emerging democratic structures often attempt to accommodate these ethnic differences through explicit devices, which can range from guaranteed minority political representation, to minority vetoes, to consociational executive branches, and to other similar structures. Overwhelmed as theory and practice are by the magnitude of these problems at the moment of institutional formation, however, we neglect to recognize the extent to which ethnic differences can be fluid and capable of changing over time in response to shifting circumstances. In particular, we do not take adequate account of the extent to which the design of democratic institutions both can shape the ways ethnic identities are expressed and the extent to which these institutions, if not well designed, may entrench these identities. The specific design of democratic institutions can make it more difficult for the inherently contingent nature of these identities to be manifested. Moreover, once democratic institutions are constitutionally built along premises that assume particular ethnic identities, those institutions themselves may become impermeable to change, even as changes in social circumstances undermine these original premises. Thus, the very institutional structures perceived as necessary to address ethnic difference synchronically—that is, at the moment of original democratic institutional formation—often undermine the dynamic possibilities for how these identities might shift and become more muted over time. The United States Senate affords a stark example. It is now the least democratically structured representative institution among Western democracies, as measured by the one-person, one-vote principle. Thirty-four million Californians have the same representation as 500,000 residents of Wyoming (a population disparity of 68:1). When the Senate was originally formed, state-based cultural and political identities were strong, and the original population disparity was only 13:1.1 If the representative institutions of the United States were being created on a clean slate today, it is difficult to believe that a senate designed as the current one would emerge. State-based identities are thinner today, but even if such state-based differences were to continue to be taken into account to some extent, it is hard to imagine there would be consensus on accommodating these differences to the extent of a 68:1 departure from political equality. Yet the fundamental structure of the Senate is not a subject of discussion in the United States. That it would be changed today is inconceivable. Overwhelmed by the sectional differences at the moment the United States was created, the framers of the Constitution neglected to build in enough capacity for the basic democratic institutions of the state to be modified over time as the sense of ethnic difference itself changed. Perhaps understandably, the framers of the United States’ Constitution missed the essential, but complex logic of this situation—how to address both existing sectional differences while designing a system that did not entrench those differences beyond their “natural” life. Even if it was understandable that the Constitution’s framers, unsure of the sustainability of democratic self-governance, missed this dynamic perspective on the design of democratic institutions, it is less forgivable today. As the overview chapter to this volume attests, the question of how democratic institutions should deal with ethnic difference in various societies is often cast as a debate between integrationists and accommodationists. The former focus primarily on the long-term normative vision of the state; they believe that the risk of long-term entrenchment and solidification of ethnic identities is so great, when political institutions are designed to accommodate group differences, that such accommodations should be avoided. Integrationist approaches often founder at the moment of state formation, however, because of a lack of sufficiently widespread political support at this particularly risk-averse moment. Accommodationists, on the other hand, focus strongly on the immediate, short-term pressures the state faces. Viewing accommodation as a practical necessity to ensure widespread support for and stability of democratic institutions, accommodationists insist that realism requires that an acknowledgment of ethnic differences be built into democratic institutions. If anything, there is growing support today for accommodationist approaches. At the same time, if accommodationist approaches are not designed with great care, they risk precluding the rise of more integrationist politics over time. Now that we have another generation of experience with these issues, I will argue that the task should not be understood as the need to choose between integration or accommodation writ large. To the extent accommodation is necessary or desirable at the moment of state formation, there is a great deal of difference among the devices and institutional structures through which accommodation is put into effect. The choice of specific structures should be made in a way that builds in the greatest capacity possible for changes in the nature and intensity of ethnic differences over time. If accommodation is necessary, it should be designed, to the extent possible, not to preclude the emergence of more integrationist politics over time. Put in other terms, the task is not to choose between integration and accommodation but to design institutions that enable societies to reach different balances between the two over time. We need a comparative and pragmatic assessment of the different institutional devices democracy has for addressing ethnic difference. That assessment should take a more dynamic perspective on the mutual interaction over time among ethnic identities, ethnic differences, and the design of the institutions and processes through which democratic political competition is channeled. The succeeding sections develop these themes, while many of the chapters in this book provide rich empirical experience from recently created democracies through which we can try to reach general insights about how best to design democratic institutions to manage ethnic difference.

Source Publication

Constitutional Design for Divided Societies: Integration or Accommodation?

Source Editors/Authors

Sujit Choudhry

Publication Date

2008

Ethnic Identity and Democratic Institutions: A Dynamic Perspective

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