Language and Ethnic Politics

Pizzi, Elise and Wenfang Tang. 2021. "Political Action by Ethnic Minorities in China." Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

How does ethnic identity affect political action in nondemocratic countries? While protest is often used to express dissatisfaction and demand government response in China, the risks associated with public demonstrations are higher for minority groups. In addition, government institutions are designed to be more responsive to minority needs. To explore the channels of state engagement for different ethnic groups, we draw on a new dataset of the preferred political activities among 8,000 individuals in China, including more than 1,500 ethnic minorities. Overall, we find that minorities are more likely than Han to prefer resolving issues through government institutions. In addition, Uyghurs and Tibetans are very unlikely to protest or to take no action when faced with a problem. Our results demonstrate that ethnic minorities choose less confrontational and more institutionalized methods for political activity than the Han majority.

Hu Yue and Elise Pizzi. 2022. "Breaking through the Linguistic Barrier: A Study of Government Policy and Barriers to Migration." China: An International Journal.

Why do migrants choose some destinations over others? This study explores the influence of language on migrant preferences. We argue that migrants prefer to move to regions where the difference in vernacular languages is smaller because of both communicative and cultural considerations. Governments can use language policies to help migrants cross over the language barrier for communication but not culturally. We examined these arguments with survey experiments and econometric analyses of national representative data of China. The empirical evidence supports our arguments even after controlling for the economic and institutional motivations, and uncovers the non-linear effect of proficiency in the language promoted by government policy. The findings have far-reaching implications of understanding the migration decision-making process and the role of language policy in shaping national integration and population dynamics.

Pizzi, Elise. 2020. "Ethnicity and Government Provision of Drinking Water Infrastructure in Rural China." Asian Survey.

What areas does the Chinese government prioritize for building new drinking water provision infrastructure? Chinese policy favors ethnic minorities and minority autonomous regions due to concerns about inequality and potential instability. However, the implementation of policy does not always reflect the pro-minority government policies. Drawing on a new dataset of more than 10,000 drinking water projects in rural Guizhou Province, I explore how ethnicity and autonomy influence the implementation of public goods provision policy in an authoritarian context. I argue that drinking water facilities are more likely to be built in majority Han areas because implementation and project completion is easier for officials. This study finds that the Chinese government provides drinking water infrastructure at a higher rate to areas where the minority population is smaller. This result indicates that implementation concerns trump policy design when it comes to drinking water infrastructure. The findings have implications for ethnic politics and public goods provision and for the implementation of policy in non-democratic contexts. In addition, these findings demonstrate why regions with larger minority populations are often slower to develop and improve access to basic public services.

Burch, Michael and Elise Pizzi. 2020. "Strategic Targeting: The Islamic State and Use of Violence in Iraq and Syria." Terrorism and Political Violence.

What explains the specific location of Islamic State attacks in Syria and Iraq? We consider previous arguments that emphasize either ethnic or economic endowments shape a group’s use of violence throughout conflict. We explore these competing motivations using a spatial analysis of the Islamic State’s individual acts of violence from 2011-2017. We find that both areas with ethnic heterogeneity and valuable economic rents are associated with more individual Islamic State violent events. By examining the micro-foundations of the Islamic State’s conflict decisions, we provide further nuance to understanding the strategic logic of rebel groups during wartime.

Liu, Amy and Elise Pizzi. 2016. “The Language of Economic Growth: A New Measure of Linguistic Heterogeneity.” British Journal of Political Science. [link]

Conventional wisdom holds that languages, as ethnic markers, build communities with shared preferences and strong social networks. Consequently, ethnolinguistic homogeneity can facilitate growth. This article challenges this conception of language as a cultural marker. It argues that language is also a practical vehicle of communication; people can be multilingual, and second languages can be learned. Hence language boundaries are neither (1) congruent with ethnic boundaries nor (2) static. If true, the purported advantages of ethnolinguistic homogeneity should also be evident in countries with large populations of non-native speakers conversant in official languages. The study tests this hypothesis using an original cross-national and time-variant measure that captures both mother-tongue speakers and second-language learners. The empirical results are consistent with the understanding of language as an efficiency-enhancing instrument: countries with exogenously high levels of heterogeneity can avoid the ‘growth tragedy’ (Easterly and Levine 1997) by endogenously teaching the official language in schools.

Burch, Michael, and Elise Pizzi. 2014. "Local Fights in National Conflicts: Understanding the Location of Conflict Events during Intrastate Conflict." Civil Wars. 16(1): 24-45. [PDF]

How do rebel groups determine their targets during intrastate conflict? We build upon two competing theories in conflict studies that emphasize either the social or economic determinants of violence during war and use geographic information systems (GIS) analysis to explore these competing theories. To do this, we utilize a subnational analysis of the most likely case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to understand whether ethnicity or natural resources motivates the location of conflict events. Accounting for geography, we find that economic endowments in the form of natural resources are highly related with the number of violent attacks, while the presence of competing ethnic groups does not offer much help in understanding the location of conflict events.