10/11/2025
📢 Join us for our first event of the 25/26 academic year!
🗓 Thursday, November 13, 2025
🕑 17:30 CET
📍 QS A-420, Central European University
💻 Hybrid | Zoom option available
🎙 Speaker: Anil Duman (Professor & Head, Political Science Department, CEU)
Talk: Between Privilege and Protest: Evidence on Ethnic Dominance and Mobilization in Authoritarian Regimes
ABSTRACT | This paper investigates the conditions under which ethnic group dominance leads to political mobilization in authoritarian regimes. We argue that ethnic dominance shapes political behavior not simply through identity or status, but through its role in structuring access to rents, patronage, and public goods. The mobilizing effect of dominance thus depends on two core features of the authoritarian political economy: the degree of ethnic fractionalization, which conditions competition over redistributive resources, and the scope of formal power-sharing institutions, which determine how those resources are allocatedand secured. Building on a typology of four institutionaland ethnic configurations, we demonstrate how elite incorporation strategies manage rent distribution and shape the expected returns to collective action among dominant groups. Using individual level data from SEAMS and a global sample of non-democracies, we show that dominant ethnic groups mobilize when cohesion and institutional integration secure predictable access to rents but demobilize in ethnically diverse regimes with extensive power sharing that threaten their privileged position. Our results reveal that ethnic dominance functions as a contingent political economy asset whose mobilizing potential depends on the structure of resource allocation and institutional constraints in authoritarian systems.
