Commodity price shocks and ethnic riots: evidence from a new dataset on majority ethnic nationalist organizations

Abstract This study investigates the relationship between national economic growth and riots conducted by members of majority ethnic nationalist organizations. Studies on economic growth and ethnic violence focus primarily on minority ethnic populations and civil war violence, devoting insufficient attention to majority ethnic nationalist organizations and ethnic rioting. This article introduces a novel dataset capturing the yearly ethnic riot behavior of 769 majority ethnic nationalist organizations from 90 randomly selected countries between 1990 and 2017. Using export price shocks as the cause of exogenous changes in national economic growth, two-way fixed-effects linear regression analysis demonstrates a negative relationship between export booms and majority ethnic nationalist organization rioting among poor countries. Additional analyses show that the relationship is stronger among militant majority ethnic nationalist organizations and in countries with higher levels of political opportunity—characterized by more democratic institutions and lower levels of repression. Although national economic growth may mediate these relationships, other pathways are possible. More broadly, the evidence demonstrates how temporal, country, and organizational factors interact to associate with declining inter-ethnic relations.