Ethnic / Religious Identities and Party Competition | Spring 2017
Febrary 16 & 17, 2017 | Contact: Lenka Bustikova
Theories of party competition have long held that the economic and pocket-book considerations dominate competitive politics during peacetime. Identity related issues related to group boundaries (ethnic concerns) and the role of religion in the state have been regularly relegated to a secondary status. This conference aims to bring to the fore this “second dimension” of party competition by investigating the degree to which theories of economic voting are relevant to voting behavior and electoral exchange between voters and politicians that emphasizes non-economic issues. In other words, under which conditions do citizens vote against their economic interests and embrace politicians or parties that emphasize national pride, ethnic affinities and religious devotion?
The conference will bring together scholars that have worked on identity-based voting and those who have written on the limitations of economic voting models along with scholars who study “non-economic” populism and the effect of migration, religion and ethnicity on political mobilization. Due to its emphasis on the processes of party competition, the conference will focus on these issues within electoral democracies.
The conference will complement the previous NERD conference held in February 2015, and other conflict-related conferences being held at ASU, that have focused mostly on violent forms of political mobilization. If funded, the 2017 NERD conference would examine the conditions under which ethnic and religious issues “trumps” economic concerns and anxieties in the electoral arena, and will also explore how, if at all, peaceful party competition around ethnic identity is fundamentally different from political competition based on religious considerations.
We hope the conference will also be of interest to faculty members at SPGS who work on party competition aligned along gender (as a form of non-economic competition), and faculty who study political mobilization. Given the surge of anti-establishment, niche candidates in the U.S. Presidential primaries who are emphasizing race, ethnicity and hatred in their appeals, this topic will also hopefully resonate with scholars of U.S. politics, campaigns and elections. The conference will thus be open to all those in SPGS who would like to participate across the working groups and sub-fields and the broader university community, both faculty and graduate students.
Ethnic and Religious Conflict Conference | Spring 2015
With the support of SPGS and the Center for Studies of Religion and Conflict at ASU, our Working Group organized an international Conference on Ethnic and Religious Conflict that took place in February 2015 at ASU. The conference, attended by leading scholars in political science, sociology, anthropology and history, analyzed the implications of these different kinds of groups for political mobilization, violence and conflict.