Daniel Bochsler: ‘Can institutions break ingroup favouritism?’

Daniel Bochsler, Associate Professor at the Central European University and Professor at the University of Belgrade, is visiting the Deparment of Comparative Politics on Tuesday 3 May. Bochsler received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Geneva, and worked previously at the University of Copenhagen and at the University of Zurich. His research deals with the effect of political institutions and social diversity, particularly with ethnic diversity, mostly in democracies in Central and Eastern Europe, or worldwide.

Bochsler will present his paper titled 'Can Institutions break ingroup favouratism?'. In his paper, Bochsler argues that political institutions can accentuate zero-sum-games in electoral behaviour, or resolve them. In most elections, voters need to pick one political party and/or one candidate, and can therefore either vote for an ingroup representative, or for one of the outgroup. This is a zero-sum-game, leading to a competition between representatives of different groups, and enhancing ingroup favouritism. To avoid that outgroup candidates compete against ingroup candidates, voters may be given two separate votes, one for each group, thus preventing the zero-sum character of elections.

Empirically, the argument is tested on a unique institutional setup in Croatia, where elections across different levels of the state take place under different rules. While in national elections, voters belonging to ethnic minorities need to chose between representatives of the ingroup and the outgroup, in local elections they have both boptions in parallel. Results show than institutions with no attached zero-sum-game enhance the cooperation with the outgroup.

Bochsler is visiting the department on invitation by the bimonthly speaker series organised by the project Strengthening Regional Democracy.

The lecture is open to everybody, but in case you are interested (or would like to read the full paper), please inform Arjan Schakel.