When and why do some social cleavages become politically salient rather than others?

Building on Posner (Posner, Daniel N. 2005. Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press), this article describes a framework for organizing the information about a community’s social cleavage structure so as to identify the incentives that individuals face to adopt particular social identities. The framework is parsimonious but powerful: it generates predictions about the social cleavages that will emerge as salient in politics, the lobbying we can expect to see regarding the social categories with which community members should identify, and the attempts that will be made to assimilate or engage in “identity entrepreneurship” to fashion entirely new social identities. The framework also clarifies why partition is unlikely to be a remedy for intractable ethnic conflicts.