Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • Ethnicity, Identity, and Meaning in Comparative Politics: A New Approach

    One of the hard things about studying ethnicity is that socially-embedded meanings and ideas about ethnic identity are hard to uncover. Qualitative and contextual research is essential, but this stands in the way of other important goals such as generalization and inter-group comparison. Political scientists who study ethnicity in the comparative context have struggled to characterize exactly how understandings of ethnicity differ across contexts. Some of the most important work on identity relies on situations where “objective cultural differences… [between groups] are identical,” which obviously makes it impossible to study differences. Other work comparing ethnic groups is forced to assume that they can be treated identically aside from their population share and distribution. This, for example, is implicit in the creation of ethnic fractionalization indices (PDF). There are alternatives to fractionalization that rely on some metric of cultural similarity or distance, but such metrics are coarse, usually unidimensional, and imposed by the researcher. It is always possible to embed questions about ethnicity or identity in surveys, but to be useful, the survey creator already must know what questions to ask, what dimensions matter, and how important they are relative to one another.

    In a new working paper I propose a different way to identify the “content” of ethnic identity and how it differs across groups. In survey data collected in 2017 in peninsular Malaysia and in three provinces (and one city) in Sumatra, enumerators asked each respondent to say two things that came to mind when respondents thought of the Malay ethnic group. Most respondents were able and willing to answer this question. Sometimes the answers are sorta funny (one Javanese respondent in Sumatra said “talk too much” [= suka bicara panjang], one Malay respondent in Malaysia said “easily colonized” [= bangsa yang mudah di jajah]). But we don’t want to pick out to silly responses, we want to pick out general patterns.

    To do this, I used a text-analytic procedure called structural topic modeling to uncover, from among the nearly 2000 responses, coherent “ideas” (or “topics”) about what Malayness means. I then used features of the respondents—age, gender, their own ethnic group, and most importantly for my purposes, whether they are Indonesian or Malaysian—to predict the likelihood that any respondent would invoke each of these ideas. (The method comes from Roberts et al. 2014.) To visualize the results, see the figure below.

    The result is a test of the hypothesis that, say, Malaysian respondents are more likely to talk about Islam (or religion in general) when describing Malays than are Indonesian respondents. That is what the above figure shows. It also shows that Malaysians are more likely to use words like “lazy” [= malas] and to invoke royalty (or more generally governance) [= raja].

    There are many other ways that one might slice these data; this is just an illustration. For a longer and more detailed introduction to this method and its uses, including exploring differences across groups within one country, see here.

  • Identity, Causal Beliefs, and Partisan Competition

    Over at the Monkey Cage, John Sides and Michael Tesler argue that “white resentment” explains support for President Trump. This is a particularly timely observation given recent news that the Justice Department plans to investigate higher education institutions for allegedly discriminating against white people, and (2) a new Senate bill to restrict immigration, especially among low-skilled immigrants. Here is their key graphic.

    Source: John Sides and Michael Telser, The Monkey Cage

    On the face of it, this is an important result about white identity politics in the United States. Assuming that Sides and Tesler are correct, its first order implications are that candidates who speak to white identity issues should gain support from voters who hold such views.

    But the second order implications are more interesting, and more consequential for partisan competition in the United States. The statement “I think minorities are taking jobs from people like me” is more than a statement about identity politics. In addition to being a claim about “who I am and what I want” it also implies a set of causal ideas or beliefs—claims about “how the world works.” In this case, the causal belief is about how labor markets work. Someone who holds the view that “minorities are taking jobs from people like me” will respond differently to low wages, economic difficulties, or unemployment than someone who does not hold this view. The latter may interpret low wages, economic difficulties, or unemployment as a sign that something is wrong with how markets function. The former may hold the belief that markets would function perfectly were it not for “the minorities.”

    As a result, identity suffuses the broader structure of partisan competition, even in domains in which a party may not wish to address it. It may be the case white identity politics may be defeated by assembling a larger coalition of people who do not hold such views: this is the promise of anti-identitarian progressivism. But this is a different task than unmaking identity politics. Doing this means defeating the causal beliefs associated with identity, such as the welfare queen and images of the “deserving” poor. This has proven a hard task in American politics.