The Information Capacity of States, Ethnic Diversity, and Social Development

• In Event: State Informational Capacity in Historical and Contemporary Governance

Abstract

A large cross-national scholarship treats ethnic diversity as an exogenous variable. This stands in tension with the wide-spread agreement in the social sciences that ethnic groups are social constructions and that ethnic identities should be understood as fluid, context-dependent, and historically changing. Consequently, a growing body of work has started to endogenize ethnic heterogeneity, including the scholarship on state capacity (Charnysh 2022; Singh and vom Hau 2016; Wimmer 2016). This paper builds on but also moves beyond this state-centered approach. We draw on the recent “informational turn” in the study of the state (Brambor et al. 2020; D'Arcy and Nistotskaya 2017; vom Hau et al. 2023; Zhang and Lee 2017) and propose a novel approach to account for variations in ethnic heterogeneity.
Specifically, we treat information capacity as the central aspect of the state (Lee 2020). We argue that states able to gather and organize knowledge about their populations were more effective in physically and culturally eradicating ethnic minorities and/or socializing them into the dominant national identity, resulting in less diversity over time. We examine this argument through a mixed-methods approach, by combining a comparative historical analysis of 19thcentury Argentina and cross-national statistical analysis.
In our analysis of Argentina, we first compare two military campaigns against indigenous peoples. During both episodes state leaders sought to construct Argentina as a white and European nation through forced assimilation and the violent eradication of Mapuche indigenous peoples. But differences in the state’s knowledge about the size and military capabilities of indigenous groups influenced the extent to which this nation-building strategy was implemented. We also study the role of informational capacity in the roll-out of mass schooling and the assimilation of European immigrants in late 19th century Argentina. Here we specifically investigate two state-led schooling campaigns aimed at “Argentinizing” Italians and Spaniards. In the latter the availability of more information about this part of the population facilitated a more targeted and better resourced expansion of public schooling, contributing to the decline of ethnic identification among European migrants. The focus on Argentina allows us to move beyond the better-known experience of developed countries and sheds light on the making of an ethnically homogeneous country.
The statistical analysis explores our argument in a comparative setting. In a first step we regress ethnic diversity onto information capacity. Our findings fit our theoretical expectations. We show a consistently negative and statistically significant association between various measures of information capacity and ethnic and linguistic fractionalization variables across different model specifications. Interestingly, the same does not hold for religious diversity, a finding that is probably related to that fact that the reproduction of religious differences also involves religious organizations. In a second step our statistical analysis directly engages with the scholarship on the so-called “diversity deficit,” which claims that ethnic heterogeneity dampens the prospects of social development. We show that the relationship between fractionalization and social development is endogenous to the infrastructural power of the state. What makes our paper different from previous works is our focus on informational shocks, rather than general indicators of state presence.
In developing this line of argument, we make three broader contributions. First, while the existing scholarship has primarily focused on the role of information capacity in shaping public goods provision, taxation, democratization, and conflict, we present one of the first systematic theoretical efforts and empirical assessments of the processes by which information capacity affects subsequent patterns of ethnic identity. Second, we take the constructedness of diversity seriously and offer a novel perspective that identifies which aspect of state capacity in the past (i.e., information capacity) is particularly relevant for shaping subsequent patterns of diversity, and which variants of ethnic heterogeneity (i.e., ethnoracial and linguistic diversity) are more likely and which ones (i.e., religious diversity) less likely to be affected. Our third contribution is to demonstrate how historical differences in state formation led to distinct patterns of ethnic heterogeneity and social development. We concentrate on the specific channel through which state capacity influences diversity, namely informational capacity. Seen in this light, our paper reinforces the call for a broader, historically minded research agenda that, at its core, asks whether ethnic fractionalization has indeed a net negative impact on development.

Author

• Matthias vom Hau, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals