Colloquium: Political Border Designs and the Salience of Ethnicity in Politics

Abstract:
We study how the design of subnational political borders shapes the salience of ethnicity in politics. We introduce a framework for measuring how political borders align with a country’s ethnic geography at the micro level. We first leverage quasi-experimental variation from Kenya’s 2010 constitutional reform to estimate the effects of border changes on ethnic voting. We then compare the actual reform with competing proposals and the border design that would minimize ethnic voting. Our results imply that ethnofederal border designs, characterized by a high alignment between political borders and ethnic geography, would reduce the salience of ethnicity in national politics.