Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface Quotes

“Page 643: By inflating the share of seats obtained by an ethnic party with a majority of votes, first-past-the-post can reduce ethnic minority representation to below proportional levels. By the same process of inflation, the plurality share of the largest or most cohesive minority can be translated into a majority of seats, sometimes at the expense of a less cohesive majority of voters. In these circumstances, proportional representation can change the result in one of two ways. If it reduces the vote-seat disparity, PR can prevent ethnic minority rule by denying a majority of seats to a party with a mere plurality of votes”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“Page 457-8: As J. M. Lee has rightly said, the more a government has striven to make its officer corps representative of the new nation, the more it makes its army vulnerable to complete collapse if the coalition of interests in the civilian order also breaks down. … Ethnically motivated interventions are, however, a distinct possibility in countries where there is a divergence between civilian and military ethnic composition. In such countries, however, civilian regimes have been prone to alter the composition of the officer corps, in order to increase ethnic balance. Those attempts may well bring on the very coups they are designed to avert.”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“As J. M. Lee has rightly said, 'the more a government has striven to make its officer corps representative of the new nation, the more it makes its army vulnerable to complete collapse if the coalition of interests in the civilian order also breaks down”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“Page 363: …an ethnic party system is highly vulnerable to being transformed into an authoritarian but no less ethnically partial regime.
Page 437: … the single party paves the way for minority rule, while providing a multiethnic cover for those groups and subgroups that are well positioned to exclude the rest”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“Page 363: …an ethnic party system is highly vulnerable to being transformed into an authoritarian but no less ethnically partial regime”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“Page 178: Majorities within a country become minorities within an international region, depending on how the region is conceived. Political space is not a fixed concept. This is another way of saying that the environment of group juxtapositions may be broader than that created by formal territorial boundaries. When once this is conceded, it becomes obvious that there is a realistic component to group anxiety”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“Page 85 -- Generally, there are more than two groups, but sometimes they nonetheless choose up sides in what becomes a bipolar confrontation. Where bipolarity does not take over, the presence of third groups opens the possibility that the largest group, though able to muster a plurality of the vote for its party, will be excluded from power by the configuration of votes and seats obtained in toto by the other groups. If the excluded group is the largest, the degree of dissatisfaction may be greater than in the simple 60-40 situation. An even more extreme result can be produced by party fragmentation. If Group A, with 60 percent of the population, divides its support between two parties, it is open to Group B or to B and C, with 40 percent but only one party, to form a government that excludes the majority group. This it can do by winning a majority of seats by repeated pluralities in three-way contests
Page 86 -- I shall show later that elections of this general type are a major - though not the only - reason for the decline of democracy in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Such elections have much to do with the outlawing of opposition, the rigging of future elections, and the incidence of military coups”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“To view ethnicity as a form of greatly extended kinship is to recognize, as ethnic groups do, the role of putative descent. There are fictive elements here, but the idea, if not always the fact, of common ancestry makes it possible for ethnic groups to think in terms of family resemblances—traits held in common, on a supposedly genetic basis, or cultural features acquired inn early childhood—and to bring into play for a much wider circle those concepts of mutual obligation and antipathy to outsiders that are applicable to family relations.”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“Page 32 - Ethnic conflict, however, impedes or obscures class conflict when ethnic groups are cross-class, as they are in unranked systems. There is, under those circumstances, a strong tendency to reject class conflict, for it would require either interethnic class-based alliances or intraethnic class antagonisms, either of which would detract from the ethnic solidarity that unranked ethnic conflict requires”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“Page 334 - Perhaps the most notable characteristic of ethnic parties is the extent to which they preempt the organizational field, crowding out parties founded on other bases. Left parties have been particularly affected by this. Over and over again, socialist intellectuals in the developing world have organized parties intending to do battle on class lines, only to find that their potential followings had rather different ideas about the identity of the enemy.

Page 337 - In conventional Marxist thinking, whole ethnic groups, at least unranked ones, could scarcely be said to occupy a class position at all. By redefining ethnic interests in terms used to characterize class positions, it became ideologically permissible to justify the reliance of a left-wing party on the support of a single ethnic group—even if some doctrinal gymnastics were involved in the redefinition.”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“The confused relationship of class to ethnicity is now much clearer. On the one hand, it has often been stated that ethnic conflict is really class conflict. On the other, it has been said that ethnic conflict is an alternative or a barrier to class conflict. Both are true, but not in the broad way in which they have been asserted. Ethnic and class conflict coincide when ethnicity and class coincide – in ranked systems. … Ethnic conflict … impedes or obscures class conflict when ethnic groups are cross-class, as they are in unranked systems. There is, under those circumstances, a strong tendency to reject class conflict, for it would require either interethnic class-based alliances or intraethnic class antagonisms, either of which would detract from the ethnic solidarity that unranked ethnic conflict requires.”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“Leadership selection constitutes another operational test of whether a ranked system exists. The leadership of a subordinate group must be acceptable to the superordinate group, which is usually in a position to reject unacceptable leaders. Influence or prestige within the subordinate group by itself is not enough. Lack of group autonomy in leadership selection is a sure sign of ethnic subordination”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“Unless precautions are taken, democratic arrangements tend to unravel fairly predictably in ethnically divided societies, as we have seen in some detail. The propensity to form ethnically based parties manifests itself. If ethnic parties split off the flanks of a multiethnic party, the leadership of the multiethnic party may end the electoral process at that point by creating a single-party regime. Alternatively, ethnic parties contest divisive elections, which produce feelings of permanent exclusion on the part of those who are ascriptively locked out of office. These feelings are conducive to violent opposition: riots, plots, separatist movements. At this point, there is another chance to create a one-party state. If party divisions persist, a seesaw coup may occur, provided the officer corps is composed differently from the civilian regime. Such a coup can also provoke violent opposition, civil or military, from ethnic groups that were formerly ascendant. Whether party leaders terminate elections, military leaders reverse election results, or separatist leaders attempt to constrict the area in which those results will prevail, it is clear that ethnic divisions strain, contort, and often transform democratic institutions”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“Preferences tend to respond to middle-class aspirations almost entirely. They do little or nothing about the resentments of those who do not aspire to attend secondary school or university, to enter the modern private sector or the bureaucracy, or to become businessmen. Although lower-class resentments are often profound- it is not, after, all the middle class that typically participates in ethnic violence – the resentments may have nothing to do with occupational mobility, and preferences do not address them. Indeed, by reducing disparities between ethnic groups, preferences are likely to increase disparities between classes within ethnic groups. This is a redistributive effect that has gone largely, though not entirely, unnoticed. The magnification of social-class cleavages in an ethnically divided society is not necessarily conducive to the moderation of ethnic cleavages. On the contrary, it may encourage the displacement of lower-class aggression onto ethnic strangers”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“The incentives toward reactive ethnic voting are strong. When voters of one group choose, in effect, not to choose but to give their vote predictably on an ethnic basis to an ethnically defined party, they put voters of the other group who do choose among parties at a collective disadvantage. All else being equal, such voters will seek to reduce their disadvantage by concentrating their votes in a comparable ethnic party. In such a situation, ethnic votes tend to drive out nonethnic votes.”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface