Scholars of American politics have expressed the concern that concentration of minority voters into limited districts in order to promote minority representation induces the partisan "perverse effect" of reducing the number of seats won by Democrats. Our theory explains how the perverse effect...

This paper develops a model of random matching with costly monitoring to demonstrate that the threat of ethnic conflict can function to create an in-group policing mechanism which helps enforce inter-ethnic social order. Instead of regarding ethnic conflict as a form of collective penalty on an...