Why can't we be friends? An evolutionary approach to ethno-cultural hierarchies

Résumé En

The share of ethno-cultural minorities is growing in world metropolises, thereby affecting inter-group relationships and altering ethno-cultural hierarchies. Some empirical studies have documented a positive impact of group size on group status, while some find no effect and others a negative one (i.e. a "cultural backlash"). In this paper, I propose a multi-group and multi-strategy evolutionary coordination game, which allows to explain the contrasted effects that an ethno-cultural minority's size may have on its social status, and on the status of other minorities, hinging on the interplay between several ethno-cultural minorities' interests. Additionally, this model (1) sheds new light on the sources of "asymmetrical homophily" between ethno-cultural groups, (2) proposes an explanation for the phenomena of fragmentation and fusion between several minorities and (3) predicts that societies with small ethno-cultural minorities will tend to converge to inegalitarian hierarchy views, which empirical studies suggest to be economically under-efficient. The model's long-term equilibrium of ethno-cultural hierarchy views is corroborated by an exploratory empirical test based on the Ethnic Power Relations database. From the methodological point of view, this paper provides a directly applicable procedure for the theoretical resolution of parametric multi-group and multi-strategy evolutionary games, allowing for potentially very interesting applications in other socio-economic contexts.