Ethnicity on the Sleeve and Class in the Heart

Are voting rights a class or an ethnic issue? They are both in the diverse societies of the developing world, yet the salience of ethnicity in public discourse frequently compels people to articulate identity demands that may be inconsistent with their material interests, particularly among the rich. This article examines these ideas with an augmented list experiment about illiterate voting rights in Lebanon. Consistent with received wisdom, direct questions yield identity-based answers in which Shiites are more supportive of voting rights than are Sunnis or Christians. Unobtrusive questions, in contrast, yield answers about material deprivation in which poor people are more supportive of illiterate voting than are rich people. The divergence between public statements and private preferences helps to reconcile theoretical predictions that people respond to material incentives with empirical findings that they pursue identity interests.