Abstract
This paper examines the influence of two major electoral rules on people’s ethnic salience through politician’s mobilization and nation-building effort. Building on the constructivist view of ethnicity, I model electoral competition between ethnic entrepreneurs and a national unitary actor under majoritarian and proportional representation voting rules. The model shows that proportional representation encourages ethnic mobilization and discourages nation-building while majoritarian rule has the opposite effect. Using data from eighteen African democracies, I find citizens feel their ethnic identities more salient under proportional representation than under majoritarian rule when approaching elections.
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