Minorities in Dictatorship and Democracy

Journal of Public Economic Theory. 2025. Vol. 27. No. 5. Article e70060.

Samsonov A.

How does the level of democracy in a country affect the government's treatment of ethnic minorities? I use the Baron–Ferejohngame to model bargaining over government formation and resource division in an ethnically fragmented society. Each ethnicgroup is a unitary actor, voting weights correspond to ethnic group sizes, and recognition probabilities are proportional to votingweights. The voting quota required to pass a decision is a proxy for the level of democracy. When the majority group exceedshalf of the population, the expected payoffs of minorities non‐monotonically depend on the voting quota. When the votingquota is small, several minorities may form a winning coalition, so minorities get high expected payoffs. This outcome explainsthe existence of relatively tolerant autocracies. For intermediate values, a coalition of minorities is insufficient to rule while themajority is sufficient. As a result, it gets most of the surplus, which reflects democracies where minorities are underrepresentedin the government and get fewer benefits. Finally, when the voting quota is large, minorities are needed to form a winningcoalition, so their expected payoffs are high, too. The latter scenario corresponds to democracies with many constraints on theleader, who needs the support of minorities to get approval from various branches of power.

Keywords: переговоры, голосование, меньшинства, bargaining, minorities, voting games