Recent literature has shown that crosscutting social cleavages reduce the likelihood of civil war. This article argues that the same logic does not apply to lower-scale group violence such as riots, which differ in such a way that crosscutting social cleavages should often have the opposite...

Has affirmative action policy in India reduced inter-caste discrimination? Using an experiment in which we measure actual discrimination, we answer this question using a sample of 350 participants from Tamil Nadu, India. We find that social mobility stemming from affirmative action has led to...

We test three central claims in the consociationalist literature: that in ethnically divided societies, conflict can be reduced by adopting (1) proportional representation over majoritarian electoral rules, (2) parliamentary over presidential or semi-presidential arrangements, and (3) a federal...