Religious, Ethnic, And Linguistic Fractionalization And Intentional Homicide Rate

I read a comment somewhere (probably on Twitter) that suggested that various types of fractionalization increased violence in a country (or were at least correlated with it). I have decided to test that theory - this post is the first on this particular idea.

For the homicide data I went to Wikipedia [1], which had the intentional homicide rate for most countries of the world. The data were from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

For the fractionalization data I went to Wikipedia [2], which had the ethnic, linguistic and/or religious fractionalization scores of 215 countries based on research done by Alberto Alesina (et al) [3]. That being said, I have learnt not to trust Wikipedia, and in this particular case my distrust was warranted. There are a number of missing values in Alesina's dataset, which were incorrectly entered into Wikipedia as a score of 0.00 (that is, no fractionalisation at all). The linguistic fractionalization score of Rwanda (according to Wikipedia) is definitely not 0.00, for example. In fact, only one country had a single score of 0.00 (in the original dataset), and that was the ethnic fractionalization score for the Comoros.


Alesina et al introduce the subject this way:

Ethnic conflict is an important determinant of the political economy of many nations and localities. Many believe that it leads to political instability, poor quality of institutions, badly designed of economic policy and disappointing economic performance.

In a cross-country setting, Easterly and Levine (1997) have shown that per capita GDP growth is inversely related to ethnolinguistic fractionalization in a large sample of countries. In particular, they argued that much of Africa’s growth failure is due to ethnic conflict, partly as a result of absurd borders left by former colonizers. As a result of that paper, a measure of ethnic fractionalization has become a “standard” control in regressions explaining cross-national differences in economic success. A related literature, early examples being Canning and Fay (1993) and Mauro (1995), has discussed the impact of ethnic fragmentation on government activities and quality of institutions. La Porta et al. (1999), in a broad empirical study of the determinants of the quality of government, suggest that ethnic fractionalization matters, even though variables related to legal origins may be more important.

A large literature on US localities show that in more ethnically fragmented communities, public goods provision is less efficient, participation in social activities and trust is lower, and economic success, measured by growth of city sizes, is inferior. Evidence that trust does not travel well across racial lines is also supported by experimental evidence.

While existing measure of racial (or ethnic) fragmentation for the US are reasonably well accepted, since they are based upon detailed and reliable census data, cross-country measures have been widely debated. Easterly and Levine (1997) use indices based on ethnolinguistic classification provided by sources from the former Soviet Union, the Atlas Narodov Mira of 1964. These data rely largely on linguistic distinctions, which may obscure other aspect of ethnicity like racial origin, skin color, etc. Interestingly, studies within the United States do not look at language in the racial classification. If they did, blacks and whites would be classified in the same language group. As we discuss below, this example shows that although useful, language is not the only way to look at ethnicity.

They continue on with more discussion, specific cases, and methods. The paper is 66 pages long (with tables) - it is quite an interesting read.

Anyhow, once I prepared the data, I used the Spearman rank correlation to see if there was a relation between homicide rate and one of the fractionalization scores. My results are the following:


"Ethnic Fractionalization" vs "Homicide Rate"

p value: < 0.001

Spearman's R statistic: 0.09

Degrees of Freedom (df): 182

"Linguistic Fractionalization" vs "Homicide Rate"

p value: 0.114

Spearman's R statistic: -0.058

Degrees of Freedom (df): 187

"Religious Fractionalization" vs "Homicide Rate"

p value: 0.062

Spearman's R statistic: 0.091

Degrees of Freedom (df): 198

Some of the paper's results:

On economic growth, we broadly confirm the results by Easterly and Levine (1997). In fact the negative effect of ethnic fragmentation on growth is reinforced with the new data, and we are able to highlight the differences between ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization.

[...]

While ethnic and linguistic fractionalization are associated with negative outcomes in terms of quality of government, religious fractionalization is not; in fact, if anything, this measure displays a positive correlation with measures of good governance; this is because measured religious fractionalization tends to be higher in more tolerant and free societies, like the United States, which in fact displays on the of the highest level of religious fractionalization. This result has no bearing, however, on the question of whether certain religious denominations are correlated with better politico-economic outcomes, an issue recently explored by Barro and McLeary (2002).

My analysis is fairly unsophisticated, so I'll have to find better data and/or better methods, particularly lower level data. Besides that, the fractionalization scores are based on data that are sometimes quite old (sometimes 20 years older than the homicide data, which is mainly from 2011-2012).

Regarding lower level data: while it appears the religious fractionalization scores took into account Shia and Sunni membership, some scores were off by quite a bit compared to the ones I calculated using data available prior 2003 (e.g. for Iran, I used figures from a book by Brenda Shaffer [5]). I will have to look into this further.

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[1] List of countries by intentional homicide rate. (2014, August 11). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:32, August 21, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate&oldid=620830328

[2] List of countries ranked by ethnic and cultural diversity level. (2014, June 1). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:46, August 21, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries_ranked_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_level&oldid=611048847

[3] Alesina, Alberto, et al. "Fractionalization." Journal of Economic growth 8.2 (2003): 155-194.

[4] Shia–Sunni relations. (2014, August 19). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 01:34, August 22, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shia%E2%80%93Sunni_relations&oldid=621944812

[5] Shaffer, Brenda. Borders and brethren: Iran and the challenge of Azerbaijani identity. MIT Press, 2002.