Endogenous Ethnicity

Abstract

Ethnicity is usually considered an exogenous variable in the field of political economy. Yet there is a growing amount of concern that ethnicity is actually endogenous and not as fixed as is often assumed. Drawing upon a long tradition of social theory leading back to Deutsch, Gellner, Hobsbawm and Marx, among others, here I show for the first time that urbanization contributes to lower levels of ethnic diversity. My results are robust to the use of various control variables, sub-samples, and newly-constructed datasets for Africa and Turkey. I also show how urbanization’s effect on ethnic diversity only matters for countries that have yet to “fully urbanize,” after which international migration has a much stronger effect.