On the Link between Ethnic Politics and Identification: Lessons from Bolivia

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the link between ethnic politics and identification in Bolivia. It does so by, first, qualitatively examining the development of political identity discourses and, second, quantitatively examining two dimensions of indigenous identification—self-categorization and cohesion—through time-series survey data. The analyses show that ethnic identifications do indeed change with changing political discourses, that they do so more quickly than expected, and not necessarily in the manner as expected: the type of reaction in identification depends on the type of dominant discourse, demonstrating that it is necessary to distinguish different elements of ethnic identification.