Social Networks and the Political Salience of Ethnicity

Ethnic politics scholars are increasingly convinced that (a) the political salience of ethnicity and (b) the correlation between ethnolinguistic fractionalization (ELF) and poor development are driven by the dense social networks shared by co-ethnics. By this argument, social networks allow ethnic parties to leverage inbuilt networks to share information and support collective action, while ethnically fragmented communities struggle to hold politicians accountable. This paper provides the first comprehensive empirical test of the assumption underlying this argument. Using seven months of telecommunications data from 9 million mobile subscribers in Zambia — which includes records of almost 2 billion calls and SMS messages — to measure social networks across an entire country, this paper finds that electoral constituencies with high ELF also have more fragmented social networks, especially in rural areas. It also finds other potential cleavages that have not achieved political salience (namely, religious identity and employment sector) are not correlated with network fragmentation, consistent with the idea that ethnicity achieves salience because it offers an organizational advantage not offered by other cleavages. Finally, it also finds that both voter knowledge and public goods are negatively correlated with network fragmentation, consistent with the network-proxy hypothesis. ∗This project would not have been possible without the generosity of numerous parties, including Real Impact Analytics, Real Impact’s Chief Data Scientists Gautier Krings, and its CEO Sébastien Deletaille. The author is also indebted to Ramya Parthasarathy, Ernest Online Appendix available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00017044_app Supplementary Material available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00017044_supp MS submitted on 15 March 2017; final version received 30 July 2018 ISSN 1554-0626; DOI 10.1561/100.00017044 © 2019 N. Eubank