Grievances, Fear, and the Nationalist Backlash to Minority Empowerment — APSA Annual Conference 2025

I presented my ongoing work on the risk of a nationalist backlash against the accommodation of minorities, together with Aya Abdelrahman and Lars-Erik Cederman, at the APSA Annual Conference in 2025. This is the abstract summarizing this talk:

There are widespread fears that the political accommodation of ethnic minorities can engender potentially destabilizing backlashes from majority nationalists. Yet we lack systematic knowledge of the magnitude of such backlashes and the conditions under which they materialize. Focusing on governmental power-sharing, we argue that it is far from obvious whether a minority's inclusion will indeed spark such backlashes. While violating majority nationalists' entitlement to rule alone, broad-based inclusion can also substantially improve inter-ethnic relations, reduce the salience of ethnicity, and thereby induce a gradual moderation process. Employing new global data on majority nationalism directed against minorities in 90 diverse states, we test the implications of these two competing mechanisms. Employing state-of-the-art difference-in-differences methods, we find no evidence for a backlash effect. To the contrary: on average, a minority's initial government inclusion is followed by gradual moderation processes, as captured by the declining extremeness of majority nationalists' ideological platforms, majority nationalists' dwindling hold on power, and a decrease in targeted ethnic violence. Our findings imply that inclusive governance in divided societies can not only accommodate ethnic minorities but also, over time, mitigate majority nationalism.