
Brief 23: Discrimination in Everyday Behavior
In this experiment, Ghanaian men negotiate taxifare well before, directly before, and 1 year after elections to judge whether election proximity affects price discrimination along ethnic and partisan lines.
Link to Full StudyCategory: Conflict and Violence
Tags: Elections, Discrimination, Ethnic Cleavages
Date of Publication: Tuesday, May 26, 2015
EGAP Researcher: Kristin Michelitch
Partners: Photo credit: L & K Bosman
Geographical Region: Africa
Research Question:
Does an impending election exacerbate discrimination on ethnic and/or political lines?
Preparer: Seth Ariel Green
Ghana is a West African country with about 26 million citizens and an average GDP per capita of $1858.24 in 2013, according to the World Bank. It is a competitive democracy with two main parties: the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC). John Atta Mills of the NDC won the 2008 presidential election by less than a single percentage point. The Ashanti and Fanti peoples are commonly associated with the NPP, and the Ewe and Ga peoples with the NDC.
Market price bargaining aka haggling is a common feature of everyday life in Accra and low-income countries more broadly. Taxi rides are typically negotiated on an individual basis.
Michelitch has used these facets of Ghanian life and applied them to an experiment that tries to explain the scholarship has held that elections exacerbate interethnic discrimination in ethnically diverse new democracies. The scholarship she builds upon presents elections as competitions over societal power and resources between political parties, not ethnic groups. Is it possible, however, that elections exacerbate interpartisan rather than interethnic discrimination? Her experiment attempts to understand how ethnic groups are nested within political parties.
Research Design:
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Election Time
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Not Election time
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Coethnic
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Lowest prices
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Lowest prices
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Non-Coethnic Copartisan
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Low prices
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Medium prices
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Non-Coethnic Non-Copartisan
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High prices
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Medium prices
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Elections do not just affect elite competition – the political contest permeates ordinary behavior between citizens typically considered to be outside the realm of politics. If electoral competition trickles down into ordinary economic activities and induces discrimination on partisan lines, it provides a clue as to why elections are often destabilizing at the citizen level.
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Policy-makers and scholars are often over-focused on ethnic cleavages as a source of societal tension. The root of discrimination may not have anything to do with ethnic differences, but differences related to a different and coinciding group competition. Policy-makers should consider other identities that coincide with ethnic cleavages before labeling tensions as ethnic.
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Where prices are not fixed, a negative consequence is that discrimination based on group-identity is able to occur. Events affecting group cleavages exacerbate discrimination.