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European Sociological Review Advance Access published online on July 22, 2005
European Sociological Review, doi:10.1093/esr/jci026
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Article

Predicting Ethnic Boundaries

Sun-Ki Chai 1*

1 Department of Sociology, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sun-Ki Chai, E-mail: sunki{at}hawaii.edu


  Abstract

It is increasingly accepted within the social sciences that ethnic boundaries are not fixed, but contingent and socially constructed. As a result, predicting the location of ethnic boundaries across time and space has become a crucial but unresolved issue, with some scholars arguing that the study of ethnic boundaries and predictive social science are fundamentally incompatible. This paper attempts to show otherwise, presenting perhaps the first general, predictive theory of ethnic boundary formation, one that combines a coherence- based model of identity with a rational choice model of action. It then tests the theory’s predictions, focusing in particular on the size of populations generated by alternative boundary criteria. Analysis is performed using multiple datasets containing information about ethnic groups around the world, as well as the countries in which they reside.


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