Can a Shared Nationality Trump Ethnic Favoritism? Experimental Evidence from Singapore

Prior works in ethnic politics and political economy have shown that in-group ethnic favoritism can lead to adverse political and social outcomes. Yet, in many of these available studies, ethnic identity could not be easily disentangled from other  dimensions of identity, such as religion, class or nationality. Hence, the independent effect of ethnic differences on social cohesion remains unclear. In this paper, we leverage Singapore’s unique demographic composition to measure the extent to which individuals’ ethnicity, national identity, and class influence their altruism towards outgroup members. We conducted a field experiment wherein we mail misdirected envelopes to residents containing vouchers and letters cuing for intended recipients’ ethnicity, class, and nationality, and track their returns as a measure of altruism. We find little evidence of ethnic favoritism in our data. Instead, letter recipients are more likely to return misdirected letters when (i) they perceive that the intended recipients belong to a lower socioeconomic class and (ii) as their education and household income increases. Our results also show some effect of national solidarity cutting across ethnic boundaries, but this effect is very context-dependent.  We discuss the implications of these findings on ethnic politics, social harmony, and nation-building.

Risa Toha is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wake Forest University.  Her research focuses on questions related to identity construction and mobilization, violence, and political economy, drawing on empirical evidence from Southeast Asia.    Her first book, Rioting for Representation: Local Ethnic Mobilization in Democratizing Countries (Cambridge University Press 2021) examines the micro-dynamics of ethnic riots in Indonesia during its transition to democracy and argues that local political actors resort to violence to protest against exclusion in local politics.   Her work has also been published in peer-reviewed journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, Terrorism and Political Violence, among others.   Prior to joining Wake Forest, Toha was an Indonesia Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, before assuming an Assistant Professor position at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.  She earned her AB at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and her MA and PhD in Political Science at University of California Los Angeles.  

Wednesday, October 11, 2023
12:00 Noon
Room 203, Luce Hall
34 Hillhouse Avenue

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