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Ethnically diverse countries are more prone to conflict, but why do
some groups engage in conflict while others do not? I show that civil conflict
in Africa is explained by ethnic groups’ cultural distance to the central government:
an increase in cultural distance, proxied by linguistic distance, increases
an ethnicity’s propensity to fight over government power. To identify this effect,
I leverage within-ethnicity variation in linguistic distance resulting from power
transitions between ethnic groups over time. I provide evidence that the effects
can be attributed to differences in preferences over both the allocation and the
type of public goods.
