Ethnoracial hierarchies are a constitutive element of many contemporary democracies. In contexts as different as Brazil, France, Peru, South Africa, and the United States, evidence abounds that Black, Indigenous, and other minoritized groups experience more poverty, receive inferior educations, toil in lower-status jobs, have less access to public services and political influence, and suffer more state-sponsored violence than those in dominant ethnoracial groups. In Latin America, which is our empirical focus here, Indigenous and Afrodescendant people have suffered oppression since colonial times and continue to endure discrimination and marginalization across multiple domains (Clealand Reference Clealand2022; Janusz Reference Janusz2022; Loveman Reference Loveman2014; Ñopo Reference Ñopo2012; Trejo and Altamirano Reference Trejo, Altamirano, Hooker and Tillery2016).
Entrenched group-based hierarchies of this sort structure persistent and pervasive systems of marginalization. They impede opportunities, limit representation, and even restrict basic rights for entire groups of people. In effect, these kinds of hierarchies construct tiers of citizens in which divergent allocations of power and agency accrue to members of different groups (Cruikshank Reference Cruikshank1999).
Scholars have long debated how ethnic and racial diversity shapes democratic politics, and the literature is replete with seemingly contradictory findings concerning both the deleterious and the salutary effects of diversity for a host of outcomes. But many of these contradictions center on important, often overlooked variation in the ways that ethnoracial differences are structured within politics and society. For instance, when ethnoracial diversity finds meaningful articulation in the political system, it can strengthen programmatic representation, enhance stability, and provide a bulwark against backsliding (Birnir Reference Birnir2006; Giusti-Rodríguez Reference Giusti-Rodríguez2024; Rovny Reference Rovny2023). In contrast, when it maps onto other systems of social or political inequality and exclusion, the results are often clientelism, conflict, and instability (Cederman, Weidmann, and Gleditsch Reference Cederman, Weidmann and Gleditsch2011; M. Johnson Reference Johnson2020a).
This insight that the hierarchical structuring of ethnoracial heterogeneity shapes its consequences for democratic politics motivates our concern here with the ways ethnoracial hierarchies have the potential to weaken democratic commitments among the citizens embedded within them. Specifically, we ask how the hierarchical ordering of ethnoracial groups shapes support for democracy in the mass public.Footnote 1 Citizens who remain committed to democracy and democratic rights promote the resilience of democratic regimes, while tepid public support for democracy opens the door to democratic erosion (Bolzendahl and Coffé Reference Bolzendahl and Coffé2013; Canache Reference Canache2012; Claassen Reference Claassen2020; Linz and Stepan Reference Linz and Stepan1996). Thus, our core finding—that ethnoracial hierarchies limit support for democracy and liberal democratic rights—demonstrates the challenges these hierarchies pose for the vitality and viability of democratic regimes.
We develop and test the argument that ethnoracial hierarchies have negative consequences for democratic commitments across society, undermining support for democracy even among privileged group members. Existing empirical studies considering the attitudinal consequences of ethnic and racial inequalities have understandably centered the experiences of minoritized group members and given less attention to hierarchy’s consequences for the privileged. But theorists have advanced the idea that group-based hierarchies form all people as citizens in ways that are challenging for democracy (Hooker Reference Hooker2017; Mills Reference Mills1997), and empirical research suggests that effectively integrating diverse ethnic and racial groups into democratic politics has the potential to strengthen democratic legitimacy and stability (Madrid and Rhodes-Purdy Reference Madrid and Rhodes-Purdy2016; Rovny Reference Rovny2023; West Reference West2015). We know less about what happens to democratic commitments across society when group-based exclusion persists. We theorize that ethnoracial systems of marginalization threaten people’s commitments to democracy by prompting them to justify political exclusion and devalue the egalitarian distribution of political rights that liberal democratic regimes are meant to promote.
Additionally, we argue that the consequences of ethnoracial hierarchy for the democratic commitments of minoritized group members depends on their group consciousness. Previous research indicates that group consciousness—a set of individually held beliefs concerning one’s group and its relationship to other groups and to society and politics overall (Avery Reference Avery2006; Clealand Reference Clealand2017; Miller et al. Reference Miller, Gurin, Gurin and Malanchuk1981)—can operate as a psychological resource for minoritized individuals, and has the potential to influence their political attitudes and behaviors (Clealand Reference Clealand2017; Dawson Reference Dawson1994; De Micheli Reference De Micheli2024; M. Johnson Reference Johnson2020b; Smith et al. Reference Smith, Clemons, Krishnamurthy, Martinez, McLaren and White2023). Though existing scholarship has typically focused on the ways group consciousness shapes outcomes like political participation and policy attitudes, we build on this research, as well as on interviews we conducted with more than one hundred Indigenous and Afrodescendant activists, policy makers, and experts during extensive fieldwork in Peru, to theorize about the way group consciousness might also facilitate the maintenance of democratic commitments among minoritized group members despite experiences of deep exclusion. We identify a structural dimension of group consciousness, which involves minoritized individuals recognizing systemic sources of ethnoracial disparities, and argue that possessing structural group consciousness is particularly consequential for the ways that ethnoracial hierarchies shape Indigenous and Afrodescendant Latin Americans’ support for democracy.Footnote 2
In addition to the interviews that inform our theoretical argument, our empirical evidence draws from public opinion data across Latin America and over time in Bolivia and uses innovative measures of economic and political inequality between ethnoracial groups. The first portion of the analysis examines the relationships between our measures of ethnoracial hierarchies and democratic commitments across Latin American publics overall. Our empirical approach accounts for the fact that democracy can carry different meanings across groups, individuals, and contexts (Carlin and Singer Reference Carlin and Singer2011) by analyzing not only support for democracy in the abstract but also commitments to specific liberal democratic rights. Second, we analyze how group consciousness conditions the effects of ethnoracial exclusion among minoritized individuals. Finally, we leverage temporal change in Bolivia, which is a rare instance of a dramatic shift toward greater ethnoracial equality.
To our knowledge, we provide the first empirical evidence that ethnoracial hierarchies are associated with weaker commitments to democracy and democratic rights across society. In doing so, we demonstrate that the consequences of these hierarchies for citizens’ attitudes are not confined to minoritized groups or explicitly racialized issue areas. Rather, the damage from systemic group-based hierarchy shapes core democratic commitments and reaches across society, harming support for democracy even among individuals belonging to privileged groups. We also show that a structural understanding of group consciousness works to limit these effects among Afrodescendant and Indigenous Latin Americans who possess it.
This paper advances our theoretical understanding of democratic commitments in the mass public. While the evidence builds on previous studies concerning the negative relationship between economic inequality and support for democracy (Andersen Reference Andersen2012; Karl Reference Karl2000; Krieckhaus et al. Reference Krieckhaus, Son, Bellinger and Wells2014), we empirically test novel expectations from political theory concerning the particular threat posed by the group-based organization of hierarchy (Cruikshank Reference Cruikshank1999). We also contribute to scholarship on the role of race and ethnicity in Latin American politics. A growing body of research has offered important insights for our understanding of ethnoracial identity formation (Contreras Reference Contreras2016; De Micheli Reference De Micheli2024; Eisenstadt Reference Eisenstadt2011; M. Johnson Reference Johnson2020b; Mitchell-Walthour Reference Mitchell-Walthour2018) as well as Indigenous and Afrodescendant movements and parties across the region (Anria Reference Anria2018; Giusti-Rodríguez Reference Giusti-Rodríguez2024; O. Johnson Reference Johnson1998; Madrid Reference Madrid2012; Paschel Reference Paschel2016; Van Cott Reference Van Cott2005; Yashar Reference Yashar2005). Outside these literatures, however, comparative politics research in the region has tended to regard race and ethnicity as ancillary rather than central to macropolitical dynamics (Clealand Reference Clealand2022; Falleti Reference Falleti2021). This paper emphasizes the need for greater attention to the political consequences of ethnoracial hierarchies by highlighting their role in shaping politics at the most foundational level and creating cracks in the bases of mass support for the democratic regime.
The theory and evidence also extend our understanding of the ways ethnoracial group consciousness matters for politics. This construct has received considerable attention in race and ethnic politics scholarship for its role in shaping political behavior, but much debate remains over the relevance of group consciousness across different outcomes, for different groups, and in different contexts (Sanchez and Vargas Reference Sanchez and Vargas2016; Smith et al. Reference Smith, Clemons, Krishnamurthy, Martinez, McLaren and White2023). Our finding that group consciousness is a powerful psychological resource for minoritized group members to maintain democratic commitments despite ethnoracial exclusion reinforces claims in other recent work concerning the theoretical and practical significance of group consciousness in Latin America and in domains beyond the typical outcomes where its effects have been analyzed (Clealand Reference Clealand2017; De Micheli Reference De Micheli2024; M. Johnson Reference Johnson2020b).
Finally, the findings speak to the consequences of ethnoracial diversity for democratic politics. We want to be clear that our contention is not that diversity itself threatens democratic commitments. Rather, we show how the hierarchical structuring of ethnoracial difference has pernicious effects for public support of democracy and adherence to liberal democratic rights. Not only does ethnoracial inequality undermine solidarity across groups and repress support for the egalitarian distribution of economic resources as previous research has shown (e.g., Gilens [Reference Gilens1999] 2009; Morgan and Kelly Reference Morgan and Kelly2017), the evidence here suggests that these dynamics may also limit support for political equality, weakening commitments to the protection of basic democratic rights for all.
We turn now to the theoretical foundations for our argument. Then we outline our data and empirical approach and present analyses of democratic commitments across Latin America and over time in Bolivia. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and substantive implications of our findings.
Ethnoracial Hierarchy and the Devaluing of Democracy
Ethnoracial hierarchies have the potential to undermine commitments to democracy across society, not only among minoritized groups but among members of privileged ethnoracial groups as well. While previous work has rarely considered this connection between democratic commitments and systems of marginalization along ethnoracial lines, several lines of scholarship point to such a possibility. We begin our theoretical discussion by outlining an underlying intuition drawn from theoretical work. Then we draw insights from previous empirical studies, first concerning the effects of ethnoracial hierarchy on egalitarian policy attitudes and second concerning the effects of other forms of inequality on support for democracy. The subsequent section theorizes about the way group consciousness might shape the relationship between ethnoracial hierarchies and democratic commitments among minoritized group members.
Ethnoracial Hierarchy and Theories of Democratic Citizenship
Political theorists have long argued that hierarchical systems have distortionary consequences for democratic citizenship formation (Cohen Reference Cohen2009; Mills Reference Mills1997; Shapiro Reference Shapiro1999; Young Reference Young1990). Ethnoracial hierarchies, in particular, construct tiers of citizens in which divergent allocations of power and agency accrue to members of different groups (Cruikshank Reference Cruikshank1999). Moreover, when oppression is systemic, as with the ethnoracial hierarchies we analyze here, it is “embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutional rules,” and in the collective consciousness that stems from being immersed in these patterns (Young Reference Young1990, 41).
These theoretical foundations suggest two key points. First, a contradiction exists between the hierarchical logic that characterizes entrenched systems of ethnoracial inequality and the premise of democracy that purports to accord equal political rights to all (Hanchard Reference Hanchard2018), and this contradiction has the potential to disrupt people’s commitments to democracy (Hooker Reference Hooker2017). Second, the repercussions of ethnoracial hierarchies are likely to extend across society, affecting privileged group members as well as minoritized individuals. This is the basic theoretical intuition informing our argument that ethnoracial hierarchies undermine all citizens’ commitments to democracy and its core principles.
Ethnoracial Hierarchy Limits Support for Egalitarian Policy
Beyond these theoretical foundations, we draw insights from several lines of empirical research to flesh out this argument. First, an extensive body of work has examined the relationship between ethnoracial inequality and attitudes toward egalitarian policies. This work provides ample evidence that ethnoracial inequalities undermine solidarity across groups, mute public demand for pro-poor policy, and enable the maintenance of inequitable resource distributions (e.g., Baldwin and Huber Reference Baldwin and Huber2010; Eger Reference Eger2010; Gilens [Reference Gilens1999] 2009; Kelly Reference Kelly2020; Lieberman and McClendon Reference Lieberman and McClendon2013; Morgan and Kelly Reference Morgan and Kelly2017). This literature tells us that inequalities along ethnoracial lines reinforce difference within society and create barriers to building empathy between groups (Pettigrew and Tropp Reference Pettigrew and Tropp2006). These dynamics encourage people to justify inequalities as rooted in the shortcomings of minoritized groups, limiting support for egalitarian policies like redistribution (Brown-Iannuzzi et al. Reference Brown-Iannuzzi, Cooley, Marshburn, McKee and Lei2021; Hancock Reference Hancock2004; Luttmer Reference Luttmer2001).
Studies examining how ethnoracial inequalities undermine between-group solidarity and limit support for egalitarian policies and outcomes have focused on these processes in the realm of material resource distributions. But the underlying logic has potential implications for the political realm as well. In essence, we know that people enmeshed in systems characterized by deep group-based hierarchies tend to accept and justify inequality. Here we argue that this rationalization of hierarchy is likely to encompass not only preferences about the distribution of resources, as previous political economy scholarship has found, but also preferences about the distribution of political rights and influence. Moreover, because political regimes are pivotal mechanisms for shaping the distribution of these political resources, it follows that the degree of ethnoracial hierarchy in society will influence people’s regime attitudes, much like it influences their policy attitudes.
Many democratic principles are premised on some form of equality. For instance, free and fair elections reflect the idea of “one person, one vote,” which supposes equal opportunities for political influence. Likewise, civil rights and liberties are intended to be equally available to all citizens. Put differently, one important feature of democracy is that it is meant to limit inequalities in the distribution of political rights and influence, similar to the way pro-poor redistribution aims to limit inequalities in material resources. Since democracy is premised on basic political equality, people’s commitments to democracy may be weaker in contexts of deeper ethnoracial hierarchy because these contexts promote acceptance of unequal resource distributions, not only in material terms but also in terms of political rights.
While existing research has not directly examined this link between ethnoracial hierarchy and democratic commitments across society, some empirical evidence suggests such a possibility. For instance, scholarship on the social dominance theory of intergroup relations has shown how group-based inequalities perpetuate themselves in part because they promote hierarchy-enhancing myths that encourage individuals embedded in these hierarchies to accede to and even rationalize inequality and oppression (e.g., Levin et al. Reference Levin, Sidanius, Rabinowitz and Federico1998; Sidanius et al. Reference Sidanius, Pratto, Van Laar and Levin2004). Research in this vein also provides evidence that hierarchy-enhancing myths contribute to activating less egalitarian and more authoritarian attitudes (e.g., Solt Reference Solt2012). Although most of these studies have focused on psychological predispositions, a handful have examined regime attitudes, providing evidence that acceptance of hierarchy promotes acquiescence to authoritarianism and undermines liberal democratic commitments like tolerance for out-groups (Morgan, Christiani, and Kelly, Reference Morgan, Christiani and Kelly2024; Morgan and Kelly Reference Morgan and Kelly2021; Velez and Lavine Reference Velez and Lavine2017).
These sorts of hierarchy-enhancing myths are readily identifiable in Latin American ethnoracial relations. Namely, myths about mestizaje in Spanish Latin America and “racial democracy” in Brazil have been instrumental in promoting indifference to the ethnoracial foundations of hierarchies throughout the region. These ideologies have perpetuated the idea that any inequalities that exist are based on class or regional differences as opposed to ethnic or racial discrimination. Although empirical evidence unmasks these ideas as myths and reveals highly racialized histories and ongoing realities in many Latin American societies, these myths have helped to disguise group-based inequalities and legitimate their perpetuation as part of the natural social order (Clealand Reference Clealand2017; Howard Reference Howard2001; O. Johnson Reference Johnson1998; Nobles Reference Nobles2000). Previous research has shown how these myths have been routinely deployed in efforts to depress citizen support for egalitarian policies and to impede the deepening of democracy across the region (Hanchard Reference Hanchard1994; Morgan, Hartlyn, and Espinal Reference Morgan, Hartlyn and Espinal2011; Paschel and Sawyer Reference Paschel and Sawyer2008; Twine Reference Twine1998). Together, these two bodies of research suggest that mestizaje and racial democracy are hierarchy-enhancing myths and that these sorts of myths help to make hierarchies self-sustaining by encouraging people to accept more exclusionary systems and reject more inclusionary ones. Building on these arguments, we suggest that because democracy follows an inclusionary logic, these hierarchy-sustaining myths, which predominate in Latin American countries with deep ethnoracial inequality (Peña, Sidanius, and Sawyer Reference Peña, Sidanius and Sawyer2004), may also operate to limit citizens’ commitments to democracy.
Economic Inequality Limits Support for Democracy
Pointing to a similar empirical expectation is another line of research, which examines the relationship between economic inequality and support for democracy. While this work has not focused on the effects of inequality between ethnoracial groups specifically, it helps to establish the idea that inequality (of another sort, at least) undermines support for democratic regimes. The most pertinent finding from this literature for our purposes here is that economic inequality is associated with weaker regime support within democracies (Andersen Reference Andersen2012; Carlin Reference Carlin2006; Fierro Reference Fierro2022; Karl Reference Karl2000; Krieckhaus et al. Reference Krieckhaus, Son, Bellinger and Wells2014; Sprong et al. Reference Sprong, Jetten, Wang, Peters, Mols, Verkuyten and Bastian2019). The basic logic in this literature is that inequality makes people dissatisfied with economic performance, and in democratic contexts this discontent undermines support for the democratic regime.
If we extend this to our thinking about the effects of inequalities between groups, we would similarly expect ethnoracial inequality to undermine support for democracy. Specifically, this line of theorizing suggests that people living in democracies characterized by deeper hierarchies along ethnoracial lines will become disillusioned with the regime and express weaker commitments to democracy than those in less hierarchical contexts. Where ethnoracial hierarchies are pronounced, certain predictable segments of the population are routinely kept on the margins. Like economic inequality, persistent inequalities between ethnoracial groups reflect a performance failure that has the potential to undermine the legitimacy of democracy (Hanchard Reference Hanchard2018).
Moving beyond economic inequality, research on the attitudinal consequences of gender hierarchies lends further credence to the idea that the negative relationship between inequality and support for democracy might exist for other kinds of hierarchical social relations as well. This scholarship has found that more inclusive gender distributions of power increase commitments to democratic ideals, not only with regard to gender equality specifically, but also concerning general democratic principles (Clayton, O’Brien, and Piscopo Reference Clayton, O’Brien and Piscopo2019; Hinojosa and Kittilson Reference Hinojosa and Kittilson2020; Kerevel and Atkeson Reference Kerevel and Atkeson2015; Morgan and Buice Reference Morgan and Buice2013; Walker and Kehoe Reference Walker and Kehoe2013). These insights push us to consider how group hierarchies may have harmful consequences that include weaker commitments to democratic rights and governance overall.
In essence, the ongoing exclusion of historically minoritized groups despite the presence of democratic procedures reminds citizens that democracy is not really delivering on its promises. The messages that emanate from these ethnoracial hierarchies juxtapose formally democratic institutions against a backdrop of profound inequalities between groups. As a result, ethnoracial inequality “poses challenges to [democracy’s] ideological legitimacy,” undermining support for the regime (Hanchard Reference Hanchard2018, 188).
Together then, several strands of previous research point toward the possibility of a negative relationship between ethnoracial hierarchy and support for democracy in the mass public. These bodies of work suggest that ethnoracial hierarchies are likely to promote acquiescence to more authoritarian forms of political order and weaken commitments to the democratic regime and its guiding principles. Our core hypothesis, then, is that deeper ethnoracial hierarchies will be associated with weaker public support for democracy and weaker support for basic democratic rights, while less pronounced hierarchies will be associated with stronger commitments to these outcomes.
Previous scholarship also suggests that this pattern is likely to manifest across society—not only among minoritized individuals but among privileged group members as well. For instance, Krieckhaus and colleagues (Reference Krieckhaus, Son, Bellinger and Wells2014) identify society-wide effects in their work on the consequences of economic inequality, showing that rich and poor are both less supportive of democracy and more willing to accept authoritarian rule in higher-inequality contexts, and Andersen (Reference Andersen2012) finds that the negative relationship between income inequality and support for democracy is actually more pronounced among the wealthy than the poor. Likewise, social dominance theory research has shown that dominant group members are at least as accepting of hierarchy-enhancing myths as minoritized individuals, if not more so (Sidanius et al. Reference Sidanius, Levin, Federico, Pratto, Jost and Major2001). This work further supports our expectation that the negative relationship between ethnoracial hierarchy and democratic commitments will be present across society.
Ethnoracial Hierarchy and Democratic Support among Minoritized Group Members
To this point, we have focused our theoretical discussion on the consequences of ethnoracial hierarchies for democratic commitments across society overall. But entrenched hierarchies are especially consequential for people who belong to groups targeted by systems of domination (Clealand Reference Clealand2017; Huebert and Liu Reference Huebert and Liu2017; Levitt Reference Levitt2015; Mitchell-Walthour Reference Mitchell-Walthour2018). Throughout Latin America, Afrodescendant and Indigenous people have suffered economic, social, and political oppression since colonial times, and ethnoracial hierarchies across the region continue to bring disproportionate harm to members of these groups (Moksnes Reference Moksnes2004; Ñopo Reference Ñopo2012; Ponce Reference Ponce2006; Telles Reference Telles2014; Trivelli Reference Trivelli2005; Valdivia, Benavides, and Torero Reference Valdivia, Benavides and Torero2007), despite some notable moves toward greater inclusion (Madrid Reference Madrid2012; Paredes Reference Paredes2015; Paschel Reference Paschel2016). Therefore, we give particular attention to how ethnoracial hierarchies matter for democratic commitments among Indigenous and Afrodescendant people.
In brief, we consider two different ways ethnoracial hierarchies might shape support for democracy among minoritized group members, and we argue that group consciousness is likely to moderate which of these patterns emerges for different individuals. On the one hand, ethnoracial hierarchies have the potential to be particularly damaging for democratic commitments among minoritized groups. Indigenous and Afrodescendant Latin Americans are the people most directly harmed by group-based exclusion, which may make contexts of deep hierarchy especially disenchanting and produce strong negative relationships between ethnoracial hierarchy and democratic commitments among members of these groups. However, ethnoracial group consciousness—specifically a structural form of consciousness that recognizes the systemic nature of ethnoracial hierarchies—may act as a psychological resource that prompts Afrodescendant and Indigenous Latin Americans to remain invested in democracy despite encountering entrenched group-based exclusion.
To develop these ideas, the following theoretical discussion draws on the race and ethnic politics literature as well as on insights from 108 interviews that we conducted in Peru with Indigenous and Afrodescendant activists, policy makers, and other experts. Peru manifests some of the deepest ethnoracial hierarchies in Latin America, and understanding how minoritized groups think about and engage with the democratic system in this context helps to illuminate the thought processes that follow from experiences of exclusion.
Two Potential Responses to Experiencing Ethnoracial Exclusion
In democracies with deep ethnoracial hierarchies, Indigenous and Afrodescendant citizens may be especially dissatisfied with the regime and skeptical about the value of democracy. This dynamic could undermine democratic commitments among minoritized group members. Previous research has shown that members of minoritized ethnoracial groups express lower trust in government and less satisfaction with state institutions, especially when they experience the sorts of discrimination, exclusion, and exploitation that are common in hierarchical systems (Huebert and Liu Reference Huebert and Liu2017; Levitt Reference Levitt2015; Nunnally Reference Nunnally2012; Soss, Fording, and Schram Reference Soss, Fording and Schram2011). The inverse is also true. Experiences of inclusion bolster support for certain democratic institutions and processes among minoritized group members (Hayes and Hibbing Reference Hayes and Hibbing2017; Hunter and Sugiyama Reference Hunter and Sugiyama2014; Madrid and Rhodes-Purdy Reference Madrid and Rhodes-Purdy2016; West Reference West2015).
This pattern essentially aligns with a performance-based logic: when people see institutions as performing poorly on their behalf, their views of those institutions are less favorable (e.g., Booth and Seligson Reference Booth and Seligson2009; Mattes and Bratton Reference Mattes and Bratton2007). Although most previous studies in this vein have emphasized how ethnoracial hierarchy prompts minoritized group members to withhold support from specific institutions, some suggest that the negative attitudinal implications of poor performance also apply to people’s views of democracy overall (Bouchard and Bourgeois Reference Bouchard and Bourgeois2023). In effect, minoritized individuals may be reluctant to support democracy because they experience it as being of poor quality. If this is the case, then Afrodescendant and Indigenous Latin Americans would be just as likely as, or perhaps even more likely than, fellow citizens to express weak democratic commitments in contexts where ethnoracial hierarchies are particularly deep. Such a response would, in fact, be quite logical given democracy’s failure to deliver on their behalf.
However, it is one thing to be dissatisfied with the operation of government institutions and another thing to turn away from democratic ways of doing politics entirely. People from minoritized groups may have much to lose if democracy gives way to autocracy. Authoritarian regimes in Latin America have historically been particularly repressive and exploitative of Indigenous and Afrodescendant communities (Cadeau Reference Cadeau2022; Leiby Reference Leiby2009; Ulfe and Sabogal Reference Ulfe and Sabogal2021), and when democratization swept the region in the final decades of the twentieth century, people from historically marginalized groups gained rights they had long been denied (Htun Reference Htun2016; O. Johnson Reference Johnson1998; Kröger and Lalander Reference Kröger and Lalander2016). These legacies may prompt Indigenous and Afrodescendant Latin Americans to remain committed to democracy, despite encountering pronounced ethnoracial inequalities in the here and now.
Indeed, studies have shown that when people from minoritized groups are confronted with injustice, they can be especially supportive of and engaged in efforts to deepen democracy (Andrews Reference Andrews1992; Boulding and Holzner Reference Boulding and Holzner2021; Paschel and Sawyer Reference Paschel and Sawyer2008). We also know that political losers tend to hold especially firm democratic commitments because autocracy is often most threatening to those permanently relegated to the margins (Carlin and Singer Reference Carlin and Singer2011). It is hard to imagine groups that have been more persistently relegated to the margins of political power in Latin America than Indigenous and Afrodescendant people. Thus, ongoing marginalization as well as historical experiences of oppression may motivate the maintenance of democratic commitments among these groups. If Afrodescendant and Indigenous Latin Americans continue to see democracy as offering a potential vehicle to protect their rights or advance their interests, they may sustain commitments to democracy even in contexts of extreme hierarchy.
These two lines of argument suggest different ways that ethnoracial hierarchies might shape democratic legitimacy among minoritized group members. The first expects a negative relationship between ethnoracial hierarchy and support for democracy among Indigenous and Afrodescendant Latin Americans, and this negative relationship will be just as pronounced as it is among other groups. The second logic suggests that minoritized group members may remain committed to democracy despite encountering profound ethnoracial hierarchies. In this instance, we would observe a less pronounced negative effect for ethnoracial hierarchy among minoritized group members. Existing scholarship concerning the relationship between membership in minoritized ethnoracial groups and support for democratic institutions and processes in Latin America lends credence to both lines of thought. Although some empirical studies have pointed toward a negative relationship (e.g., Levitt Reference Levitt2015; West Reference West2015), others have found little evidence of such an effect (e.g., Fierro Reference Fierro2022; Sanchez, Doherty, and Dobbs Reference Sanchez, Doherty and Dobbs2021).
These apparently mixed findings may actually be the result of differences in the ways that individual members of minoritized ethnoracial groups respond to the hierarchical systems that they confront. Whether their democratic commitments are weaker (as in the first logic) or persist (as in the second) may depend on other factors that shape how people respond to exclusion. Rather than being uniform across minoritized group members, these patterns may vary in theoretically predictable ways and therefore produce different relationships in different samples, as the inconsistent findings from previous studies seem to suggest. To unpack the possibility that minoritized group members’ responses to exclusion are conditional on their preexisting attitudes and experiences, we join calls to move beyond identity itself as explanation and theorize the link between identity and its political consequences (De Micheli Reference De Micheli2024; Lee Reference Lee2008; Sen and Wasow Reference Sen and Wasow2016).
Group Consciousness and the Maintenance of Democratic Commitments
But what precisely conditions the way that ethnoracial hierarchy shapes democratic commitments among minoritized group members? We argue that ethnoracial group consciousness plays this moderating role. We focus on the potential effect of group consciousness because extensive research on race and ethnic politics has emphasized how different dimensions of group consciousness are consequential for structuring political attitudes and behavior (Clealand Reference Clealand2017; Lee Reference Lee2008; McClain et al. Reference McClain, Carew, Walton and Watts2009). These studies typically treat group consciousness as a set of individually held beliefs concerning one’s group and its interests as well as the group’s relationship to other groups and to politics and society overall (Avery Reference Avery2006; Clealand Reference Clealand2017; De Micheli Reference De Micheli2021; Laniyonu Reference Laniyonu2019; Lien Reference Lien1994; Miller et al. Reference Miller, Gurin, Gurin and Malanchuk1981; Sanchez Reference Sanchez2006), and the evidence suggests that group consciousness provides an important psychological resource for minoritized group members (Dawson Reference Dawson1994; De Micheli Reference De Micheli2024; Smith et al. Reference Smith, Clemons, Krishnamurthy, Martinez, McLaren and White2023). Unlike other more tangible political resources, such as time, money, or education, group consciousness provides a resource through an individual’s internalized predisposition in favor of their group and its interests (for a detailed discussion of this logic, see Smith et al. Reference Smith, Clemons, Krishnamurthy, Martinez, McLaren and White2023). In the Latin American context specifically, studies have shown how group consciousness helps to make minoritized group members more likely to challenge racism, confront ethnoracial inequalities, and support candidates and organizations aligned with their identity (for a review, see Clealand Reference Clealand2022, 350).
We build on this body of work and theorize that certain forms of group consciousness might also provide a resource that minoritized individuals may draw on to maintain commitments to democracy. Much like how group consciousness can facilitate support for more equity-minded policies, it may also enable minoritized individuals to support democracy as a way to protect their group’s rights from the vicissitudes of autocratization or as a path toward improving their group’s status. In this way, ethnoracial group consciousness may promote the maintenance of democratic commitments among marginalized group members in contexts of profound ethnoracial hierarchies.
To be more precise, we expect this moderating effect to be exerted by a particular structural dimension of group consciousness. We define structural group consciousness as a form of consciousness in which minoritized individuals recognize the systemic sources of ethnoracial disparities. In other words, when members of historically marginalized groups understand ethnoracial hierarchies as originating in socioeconomic or political systems—not simply as the result of individual or group-level differences or shortcomings—they are expressing structural group consciousness. This understanding of group consciousness is less about individuals’ identification with the group or affinity with its collective culture and is especially concerned with centering the systemic nature of ethnoracial inequality (M. Johnson Reference Johnson2020b).
Previous research suggests that structural understandings of ethnoracial disparities are important for shaping minoritized individuals’ commitments to group-centered attitudes and behaviors (Lien Reference Lien1994; Miller et al. Reference Miller, Gurin, Gurin and Malanchuk1981; Paschel Reference Paschel2016). The race and ethnic politics literature tells us that group consciousness has multiple dimensions that do not always cohere into a single construct across groups or individuals (Clealand Reference Clealand2017; M. Johnson Reference Johnson2020b; Lien Reference Lien1994; Sanchez and Vargas Reference Sanchez and Vargas2016), and while the different dimensions of group consciousness may all carry political weight, their precise effects often vary (Lee Reference Lee2008, 463). Our emphasis here on the concept of structural group consciousness builds on a series of studies that have identified “system blame” as a component of group consciousness that is particularly consequential for the political stances of minoritized individuals (Lien Reference Lien1994). This literature suggests that holding this structural dimension of group consciousness makes people more likely to see a need for systemic reforms that aim to level hierarchies and to embrace political or policy solutions that advance this goal (McClain et al. Reference McClain, Carew, Walton and Watts2009). For instance, in their classic treatise on group consciousness, Miller and colleagues (Reference Miller, Gurin, Gurin and Malanchuk1981) argued that holding a belief that systemic injustices “are responsible for a group’s disadvantaged status in society” is crucial for activating engagement for minoritized individuals. More recently in Latin America, Paschel (Reference Paschel2016) has shown how recognizing systemic race-based disadvantage is crucial for mobilization toward greater ethnoracial equality.
These studies suggest that minoritized individuals equipped with structural group consciousness are more likely to challenge the hierarchical status quo through democratic institutions or processes (De Micheli Reference De Micheli2024; Miller et al. Reference Miller, Gurin, Gurin and Malanchuk1981; Mitchell-Walthour Reference Mitchell-Walthour2018; Slaughter Reference Slaughter2021; Smith et al. Reference Smith, Clemons, Krishnamurthy, Martinez, McLaren and White2023). While studies have emphasized how structural understandings of ethnoracial disparities operate to foster support for equity-minded policies, we build on this idea by theorizing that a similar process may also work to sustain minoritized group members’ support for equity-oriented systems. If people see democracy as a potential avenue for advancing equality, then the negative effects of hierarchy on their support for democracy may be mitigated (Sanchez, Doherty, and Dobbs Reference Sanchez, Doherty and Dobbs2021). Therefore, when minoritized group members possess structural group consciousness, we expect democratic commitments to be more stable even in the face of hierarchy.
If this is the case, then minoritized individuals who possess structural group consciousness will respond to ethnoracial hierarchies in line with the second theoretical logic outlined above. Namely, they will maintain support for democracy because they see it as a potential path toward protecting group rights and interests. We would therefore expect minoritized individuals with high structural group consciousness to remain committed to democracy regardless of the depth of hierarchy they confront, mitigating the negative effect of ethnoracial hierarchies on their support for democracy. In empirical terms, we would expect these individuals to diverge from the general negative relationship between group-based hierarchy and commitments to democracy.
On the other hand, minoritized individuals with low levels of structural group consciousness may be more prone to become disenchanted with democracy. Group consciousness provides a psychological resource that facilitates an orientation in favor of the group’s interests despite extreme forms of oppression and marginalization. Without this resource, minoritized individuals may be less firmly committed to prioritizing group-centered policies and practices. If this process is relevant not only for attitudes toward public policies and political actors, as shown in previous work, but also for attitudes toward democracy, then we would expect minoritized group members with low group consciousness to respond in line with the first logic outlined above. This logic simply expects minoritized group members to become less supportive of the democratic regime in contexts of deeper inequality. In essence, minoritized individuals with low group consciousness will become disillusioned with the democratic regime, and their democratic commitments will be weaker as a result. Empirically, we would not expect to see much difference in the negative effects of ethnoracial hierarchy for these individuals as compared to members of other ethnoracial groups.
The interviews that we conducted with Afrodescendant and Indigenous activists, politicians, government officials, and other experts across Peru lend additional insights into the way that structural group consciousness moderates how Indigenous and Afrodescendant Latin Americans respond to ethnoracial hierarchy.Footnote 3 As part of these conversations, we asked Indigenous and Afro-Peruvians a series of questions about their understandings of their identity, about how they became active in the Indigenous or Afrodescendant movement, and about the formulation of group goals, their strategies for advancing them, and their relationship to the state. These prompts opened up many interesting lines of conversation, but for our purposes here, the relevant insights concern the dimensions of group consciousness that our interlocutors emphasized in thinking about their group as well as how these facets of their consciousness connected to politics. We want to emphasize that the interview data as presented here are not meant to provide a test of our argument concerning the moderating effect of structural group consciousness: such a test would require more extensive analysis, which lies outside the scope of this paper. Rather, we draw from the interviews to illustrate the logic and plausibility of our argument and to situate it in the Latin American context. The reflections from our interlocutors suggest that structural group consciousness has consequences not only for policy attitudes and patterns of engagement as previous research has shown, but for how minoritized group members view democracy as well.
In our conversations, we found that Afrodescendant and Indigenous activists who articulated structural forms of group consciousness were more inclined to engage with the democratic system, to support democracy overall, and to express clear commitments to democratic rights and principles. In contrast, when their group consciousness had other underpinnings, our interlocutors tended to express more disillusionment with democracy and more willingness to circumvent democratic institutions and procedures.
For instance, an Afrodescendant activist who took a structural stance in his understanding of racial disparities also maintained a firm commitment to continued engagement with democracy. First, in reflecting on the experiences of Afro-Peruvian organizations, this activist emphasized the structural nature of the impediments he encounters: “It is a fight against the demons of the system—against a system or against a structure that has generated, shall we say, an entire framework to understand the Afro-Peruvian as subaltern, as abject, as unworthy of being taken into consideration.” Then, when talking about Afro-Peruvians’ stances vis-á-vis the democratic system, he emphasized the need for continued engagement—to work through the system to pursue “better policies of greater quality that redistribute for the Afro-Peruvian population.”Footnote 4 His clear expression of structural consciousness was followed by a commitment to the democratic process as a means to advance equality for Afro-Peruvians.
Likewise, when recounting his personal story of activism, an Indigenous organization leader emphasized the central role of recognizing “not what I would call the racism of the street … but what I would call, on the other side, the state’s systematic structural racism,” which he defined as “the absence of effective policies to protect Indigenous people, the failure to allocate state resources to Indigenous communities, and the lack of processes of prior consultation or consent.” He then immediately followed this straightforward articulation of structural group consciousness with a discussion affirming that Indigenous organizations exist to promote “representation and to have or, hmm, to exercise the rights of Peruvian citizenship.”Footnote 5 For this activist, concern for democratic rights and representation were directly linked to his structural group consciousness.
In contrast, an Indigenous leader whose group consciousness was less structural and more cultural expressed considerable indignation about the democratic state. Her responses to questions about identity formation and group goals focused on connecting to Indigenous culture and heritage. Later, when asked about the group’s interactions with the state, she critiqued democratic procedures for their failure to “respect our rights. … They stigmatize us. … We can make demands but the rules are not followed or there are other norms that contradict them. People become frustrated.”Footnote 6 This activist’s conception of group consciousness emphasized its cultural dimensions, and her thinking about the democratic system primarily reflects frustration and alienation. Similarly, an Afrodescendant activist, whose work is dedicated to recognizing Afrodescendant cultural contributions as opposed to rectifying legacies of injustice and inequality, showed limited investment in routine democratic processes. Instead, when asked directly about the possibility of engaging in conventional democratic procedures like elections, he maintained his position outside and in opposition to the system, “because being outside, you can denounce and protest.”Footnote 7 While these practices are certainly legitimate and not necessarily antidemocratic, this activist set his critical stance resolutely apart from the electoral procedures that are core elements of the democratic system.
Based on our interviews as well as previous research, then, we articulate two hypotheses concerning the moderating effect of ethnoracial group consciousness among minoritized group members. First, for minoritized group members with low levels of structural group consciousness, ethnoracial hierarchies will have a negative relationship with democratic commitments, similar to the effects for society at large. Second, for minoritized group members with high levels of structural group consciousness, we expect the negative effects of ethnoracial hierarchy to be weaker or disappear entirely. For these individuals, democratic commitments will be more stable despite the depth of group-based hierarchies.
Empirical Strategy
To evaluate these expectations, we begin with cross-national analysis of the relationships between systemic ethnoracial hierarchies and democratic commitments in Latin America. We follow by evaluating how structural group consciousness conditions the relationship between ethnoracial inequality and democratic commitments among minoritized group members. Finally, we examine temporal changes in support for democracy within Bolivia before and after a shift toward greater ethnoracial equality there.
We focus on Latin America because doing so enables analysis across a group of countries where the basic procedures of democracy are routine even while deeply rooted democratic norms and practices often remain out of reach. Latin American countries also share similar logics of ethnoracial hierarchies that systematically disadvantage Afrodescendant and Indigenous people and privilege people with lighter skin and more European cultural markers and features (Loveman Reference Loveman2014), enabling consistency in concept and measurement and facilitating cross-national comparison which would be more challenging if we compared countries with widely divergent axes of ethnoracial inequality. At the same time, this set of countries manifests significant variation in the depth of inequality, providing analytical leverage (Ayala-McCormick Reference Ayala-McCormick2021). Furthermore, the persistence of ethnoracial hierarchies across Latin American democracies makes understanding the ways racialized exclusion might threaten democratic commitments especially relevant for understanding social and political dynamics in the region.
Cross-National Data and Analysis
The cross-national analysis uses individual-level public opinion data from seven waves of the AmericasBarometer surveys conducted across Latin America beginning in 2004 (Center for Global Democracy 2024).Footnote 8 Our central interest is the relationship between ethnoracial hierarchies and democratic commitments in the mass public. Our first dependent variable is a survey item that measures this concept by asking respondents whether they agree that democracy is the best form of government. Additionally, we analyze an additive index designed to capture specific support for basic democratic rights: the right to protest, the right to join in civic organizations aiming to address community problems, and the right to participate in electoral campaigns on behalf of parties or candidates. Previous research has demonstrated that democracy carries different meanings across groups, individuals, and contexts (Carlin and Singer Reference Carlin and Singer2011; Schedler and Sarsfield Reference Schedler and Sarsfield2007), which can complicate efforts to capture support for democracy empirically. Here our aim is to understand how support for the procedural protections offered by liberal democracy may be threatened by the kinds of substantive shortcomings that are evident in entrenched systems of group-based inequality. In other words, we are most interested in the ways that ethnoracial hierarchies may undermine support for the core tenets of liberal democracy. This goal motivates our measurement. While our first dependent variable captures support for democracy overall, the second index measures adherence to a core component of liberal democracy: the protection of basic civil and political rights and liberties (Dahl Reference Dahl1971; Diamond, Linz, and Lipset Reference Diamond, Linz, Lipset, Diamond, Linz and Lipset1989; Karl Reference Karl1990). Both measures have been used to understand commitments to democracy in societies the world over (e.g., Dalton Reference Dalton2004; Gorman, Naqvi, and Kurzman Reference Gorman, Naqvi and Kurzman2019; Seligson and Booth Reference Seligson and Booth1993), and scholars seeking to analyze support for liberal democracy as opposed to other understandings of democracy have emphasized the suitability of measures that capture support for basic civil and political rights—as our second measure does—because these measures are closely aligned with the concept of liberal democracy (Ceka and Magalhães Reference Ceka and Magalhães2020). Appendix A in the online appendices provides descriptive statistics and additional details concerning construction of these and all other variables.
To capture ethnoracial hierarchies, we employ two innovative measures of systemic ethnoracial inequality at the country-year level. Ethnoracial hierarchies exist across many spheres and reflect entrenched systems that disproportionately allocate power, resources, and benefits to some groups while excluding or exploiting others. Our measures capture systemic hierarchies in politics, which is particularly pertinent given our focus on explaining support for democracy, and in economic well-being, an outcome that encapsulates the accumulation of harm across a whole host of domains including education, employment, healthcare, nutrition, infrastructure, and so on. These are the kinds of systemic hierarchies that we theorized as being particularly inimical to democratic commitments.
For political hierarchies, we seek to capture the distribution of political influence across ethnoracial groups. We find a suitable measure in the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project, where country experts provide annual scores on a range of topics pertaining to the institutions and practices of democracy. The V-Dem item we use (v2pepwrsoc) measures the extent to which political power is concentrated or distributed across ethnoracial groups. We code this measure so that higher values indicate a greater concentration of power in the hands of a dominant ethnoracial group while lower values indicate more equal power distributions. This political exclusion measure captures significant regional variation in ethnoracial political inequality, and the distribution of countries has face validity, with Guatemala rated the most exclusionary country and Costa Rica—where prominent Afrodescendant leader Epsy Campbell Barr recently completed a term as vice president—ranked among the most inclusionary.
To measure ethnoracial hierarchies in economic well-being, we use between-group inequality (BGI). BGI captures differences in household well-being between major ethnoracial groups within a country, weighting each group according to their size. BGI is calculated by assigning individuals within an ethnoracial group the mean well-being level for the group and then proceeding with calculating a Gini coefficient in the usual way (Baldwin and Huber Reference Baldwin and Huber2010, 646). This calculation produces a weighted, country-year estimate of inequality between groups, similar to the way the Gini estimates individual-level inequality. Costa Rica and Paraguay (where economic gaps between ethnoracial groups are not large) have the lowest scores on BGI in the region while Bolivia and Guatemala (where some ethnic groups lag far behind others economically) have the highest levels of BGI.
Unlike measures of ethnoracial inequality that separately compare each group to some reference point, BGI incorporates all group-based economic inequalities in a single measure. This measurement strategy captures how ethnoracial hierarchies in economic well-being matter across entire societies as well as among individuals belonging to different ethnoracial groups, as our theory anticipates. As with our political inequality measure, Latin American countries display substantial variation in BGI, and country scores reflect common understandings of regional differences in these hierarchies. Our intention in using these two measures is to capture different dimensions of the same underlying concept of ethnoracial hierarchy. We expect the empirical patterns for the two measures to be similar: more hierarchy will be associated with weaker democratic commitments.
We also consider how systemic ethnoracial inequalities matter for minoritized group members specifically. The initial cross-national analysis here simply includes indicator variables capturing respondents’ self-reported ethnoracial identity—Afrodescendant, Indigenous, mestizo, and other ethnicity, with white as the reference category.Footnote 9 Below, we present further analyses that evaluate our expectations concerning the moderating effect of structural group consciousness for minoritized group members.
We fit multilevel models with individuals nested in country-years, which accounts for clustering in the error term, addresses the threat of biased standard errors, allows us to attribute variation in individual-level responses to the proper level of analysis, and later facilitates the testing of our conditional hypotheses (Raudenbush and Bryk Reference Raudenbush and Bryk2002; Steenbergen and Jones Reference Steenbergen and Jones2002). Intercepts for each country-year are permitted to vary, which ensures our results are not driven by common temporal trends across countries and guards against omitted variable bias at the country-year level. As an additional protection against omitted country-year variable bias, we estimated our main models using a non-nested two-way fixed-effects model including both time and unit fixed effects. The results remain substantively unchanged and are reported in appendix C.
In addition to the variables of theoretical interest, we control for other factors that might produce variation in respondents’ democratic commitments. People may be more supportive of democracy when their preferred candidates win elected office, so we control for voting for the incumbent president. Support for democracy might also be shaped by economic conditions including crisis; we therefore control for sociotropic economic evaluations. Additionally, we account for the possibility that democratic commitments vary by religiosity, education, and well-being, as well as gender, age, and geographic location. Models excluding individual-level controls are reported in appendix J. The online appendices also report additional models that include contextual-level controls for general inequality measured by the Gini coefficient, history of democracy, and ethnic fractionalization (appendices D and E). To account for the possibility that the quality of democracy based on institutional features such as judicial independence, horizontal accountability, and free elections drives support for democracy, we also estimate supplemental models controlling for the V-Dem liberal democracy score (v2x_libdem) (appendix F). Results for these alternative specifications remain substantively similar to those reported here.
Consequences of Hierarchy for Democratic Commitments
Table 1 presents the main results for both dependent variables, with the measure of support for democracy overall in the first two columns and the index capturing support for core liberal democratic rights in the third and fourth columns. Columns 1 and 3 focus on the effects of between-group inequality while columns 2 and 4 examine the effects of political exclusion. In addition to the core explanatory variables, the models include individual ethnoracial identity and the full battery of controls. The democracy best item was asked in more years than the democratic rights index, making the sample sizes smaller in columns 3 and 4.
Multilevel Models of Ethnoracial Hierarchy and Attitudes toward Democracy
Notes: Standard errors in parentheses. Reference category for ethnoracial identity: white. Models include random intercepts. Constant estimated but excluded from table. † p < 0.10; * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.001.
The first two rows report the relationships that BGI and political inequality have with support for democracy (columns 1 and 2) and for basic democratic rights (columns 3 and 4).Footnote 10 We immediately see that democratic commitments are more muted in contexts of greater ethnoracial hierarchy. BGI is strongly and significantly associated with weaker democratic commitments. Concentration of political power in the hands of the dominant group also has negative relationships with support for democracy and for democratic rights.
Figure 1 and 2 visualize these results across observed values of BGI and political exclusion. The negative slopes in figure 1 illustrate that overall support for democracy deteriorates as both economic and political hierarchy increase. The decline in predicted support for democracy is especially large across levels of political hierarchy (figure 1b): as ethnoracial political exclusion moves from its lowest to highest observed level, support for democracy as the best form of government declines by a full point. This change is roughly equivalent to the difference between Costa Rica—the Latin American country with the second-highest score on this outcome—and Peru—the country that scored lowest.
How Support for Democracy Changes as Ethnoracial Hierarchies Increase
How Support for Democratic Rights Changes as Ethnoracial Hierarchies Increase
Figure 2 depicts predicted support for liberal democratic rights. Again, we see negative slopes. Here the relationship with economic hierarchy stands out (figure 2a). As BGI moves from its lowest to highest observed value, support for basic democratic rights declines by approximately a point and a half. This change is comparable to the difference between Argentina and Bolivia, with Argentina ranking among the top third of countries on this index and Bolivia placing last.
This evidence supports our core hypothesis that ethnoracial hierarchies are negatively associated with democratic commitments in the mass public. We observe these effects society-wide, which indicates that ethnoracial inequalities are broadly associated with lower democratic legitimacy.
In the online appendices, we report additional models showing the effects separately for white respondents (appendix H) as well as Indigenous and Afrodescendant people (appendix I). These results are substantively similar to the results for the full sample, demonstrating that the general findings reported here are not driven by those from minoritized groups but manifest among members of privileged ethnoracial groups as well. Together, these findings align with our expectation that citizens living in democracies characterized by deep group-based hierarchies will have weaker support for democracy and for liberal democratic rights, and that these negative effects will exist across society as a whole.
Group Consciousness Moderates Exclusion’s Effects among Minoritized Groups
We now consider how hierarchies shape democratic commitments among those who suffer most directly within Latin American systems of ethnoracial inequality: Indigenous and Afrodescendant people. We delineated two different lines of argument in this regard, and we have theorized that the way these patterns play out is moderated by the nature of ethnoracial group consciousness. The first argument expects contexts of deeper hierarchy to limit democratic commitments among minoritized Latin Americans at least as much as they do among other ethnoracial groups (if not more so). Empirical evidence in line with this hypothesis would be negative relationships between ethnoracial inequality and democratic commitments among those who identify as a member of a minoritized ethnoracial group. If minoritized group members have low levels of structural group consciousness, we expect patterns in line with this first conditional hypothesis.
The second line of argument suggests that people from minoritized groups may sometimes confront exclusion by holding onto democratic commitments because they see the meaningful enactment of democracy as a potential avenue for countering oppression. Evidence for this view would be flatter slopes for the relationships between hierarchy and democratic commitments among minoritized group members (i.e., the negative effects of hierarchy will be less pronounced). If marginalized group members have strong structural group consciousness, we expect patterns that align with this second conditional hypothesis.
To consider these possibilities we use a measure of structural group consciousness available in some of the AmericasBarometer data. Respondents were asked a question about the causes of ethnoracial disparities in poverty. Response options included “because of culture” and “because of unjust treatment.” Indigenous and Afrodescendant people who saw this ethnoracial inequality as the product of unjust treatment recognize systemic injustices as important sources of group-based disparities. This survey item aligns with our concept of structural group consciousness, which we have defined as minoritized individuals acknowledging the structural causes of ethnoracial disparities. This item is also similar to survey items used in previous studies to measure dimensions of group consciousness that have structural underpinnings. For instance, in one of the most cited articles on group consciousness, Miller and colleagues (Reference Miller, Gurin, Gurin and Malanchuk1981) use a measure that specifically captures “the belief that a [minoritized] group’s social status is attributable to individual failings or [alternatively to] structural inequities” (McClain et al. Reference McClain, Carew, Walton and Watts2009, 477). They see this item as measuring whether minoritized individuals recognize that ethnoracial disparities are caused by systemic factors as opposed to individual or group characteristics. This is the precise logic reflected in the survey item that we use to measure structural group consciousness in our analysis. Overall, then, this measure is conceptually suitable and aligned with previous scholarship. We consider structural group consciousness to be high for respondents who saw unjust treatment as the predominant cause of ethnoracial inequality and low for those who did not. This item was asked in all AmericasBarometer countries in 2012, and in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru in 2010.
To test how structural group consciousness moderates the consequences of ethnoracial hierarchy among minoritized individuals, we incorporate this measure into multilevel models similar to those reported earlier (although data availability on the group consciousness measure means fewer country-years are analyzed). Unlike the previous models where we simply included indicator variables for Indigenous and Afrodescendant identity, we instead include group consciousness. The measure takes on a score of one for Afrodescendant and Indigenous respondents who express structural group consciousness (labeled high group consciousness in our tables). We also include an indicator variable for marginalized group members who do not evidence structural group consciousness (labeled low group consciousness in our tables). Then, to evaluate whether having structural group consciousness moderates the effects of hierarchy, we interact these two indicator variables with BGI and political exclusion separately.
The results are detailed in table 2. The key coefficients in each column are the multiplicative interactions between high and low structural group consciousness and the two measures of hierarchy. A significant interaction term indicates the effect of hierarchy for those included in the interaction (minoritized individuals with high or low structural group consciousness) differs from the white baseline category. To determine whether the association between hierarchy and the outcome is different between those with high and low group consciousness, we conduct a test of the equality of the two interaction terms in each column. This is the central test of our conditional hypothesis, as we expect significant differences between minoritized individuals who have high versus low group consciousness.
Multilevel Models with Structural Group Consciousness as a Moderator of Ethnoracial Hierarchy among Minoritized Group Members
Notes: Standard errors in parentheses. Reference category for ethnoracial identity: white. Reference category for group consciousness: non-Indigenous and non-Afrodescendant. BGI is centered when included in interaction terms. The political exclusion measure follows a centered scale already. Models include random intercepts plus random coefficients for individual-level variables that are part of interactions. Constant estimated but excluded from table. † p < 0.10; * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.001.
We find that overall support for democracy among Indigenous and Afrodescendant respondents is more resilient to increasing inequality when they possess structural group consciousness. The interaction terms for minoritized individuals with and without group consciousness are in opposite directions, and the differences between the coefficients on the two interaction terms are statistically significant (at p < 0.10 for BGI and p < 0.01 for political inequality). Similar interaction effects are not present for the democratic rights outcome variable. We note, however, that support for these basic liberal democratic rights is generally higher among minoritized groups members across the board, as indicated by the positive and statistically significant coefficients for Indigenous and Afrodescendant Latin Americans in table 1 (at p < 0.05 and p < 0.10, respectively). These patterns suggest that minoritized group members support these core democratic rights more consistently than their white neighbors across all levels of ethnoracial hierarchy, whereas their support for the democratic system is conditioned by their group consciousness. We did not theorize about this possibility, but it may be that minoritized group members remain steady in seeing the basic protections that democracy offers as important because implementing these protections helps to shield them from some degree of oppression. On the other hand, support for the overarching idea of a democratic regime is more conditional.
In Figure 3, we chart the predicted level of support for the democratic system for those with high and low structural group consciousness across values of economic (left panel) and political hierarchy (right panel). The figure clearly illustrates that structural group consciousness moderates the deleterious effects of both forms of hierarchy on support for democracy among minoritized group members. When Afrodescendant and Indigenous people possess structural group consciousness, their support for democracy remains essentially the same across all observed levels of economic and political inequality. Conversely, minoritized individuals who do not possess this sort of group consciousness manifest significantly lower support for democracy when economic and political inequality are high. These findings lend support to our expectation that structural group consciousness serves as a psychological resource that minoritized group members draw on to maintain support for the idea of democracy, even when they encounter profound economic and political exclusion.
Effects of Ethnoracial Hierarchy on Support for Democracy by Group Consciousness among Minoritized Individuals
Reducing Ethnoracial Hierarchy Strengthened Democratic Commitments in Bolivia
While ethnoracial hierarchies are often entrenched and rarely undergo dramatic change, Bolivia offers a rare instance of a sudden and significant shift toward greater ethnoracial equality. Thus, while the cross-national analysis above enabled us to evaluate the relationships between ethnoracial hierarchy and democratic commitments across Latin America for both entire societies and minoritized group members, temporal analysis within Bolivia offers useful leverage over the causal process by enabling us to evaluate how democratic commitments change following a significant decrease in ethnoracial hierarchy. Also, focusing on a single country allows us to hold myriad contextual factors constant by design, which bolsters our ability to make inferences.
Ethnoracial hierarchies established in Bolivia during colonial times were reinforced in the post-independence period and largely remained the status quo even following its democratic transition in the 1980s. Institutions and processes favoring dominant white and mestizo elites perpetuated disproportionate poverty among Indigenous Bolivians, normalized systemic discrimination, and marginalized Indigenous concerns from conventional politics (Barr Reference Barr2005; Lucero Reference Lucero2008; Yashar Reference Yashar2005).
But in 2005 the pro-Indigenous party Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) gained control of the legislature, and its leader Evo Morales won the presidency (Anria Reference Anria2018; Boulding et al. Reference Boulding, Foxworth, Núñez and Guachalla2019; Madrid Reference Madrid2012). This victory as well as subsequent reform processes brought many Indigenous Bolivians and their allies into power and distributed influence and resources more evenly across ethnoracial groups (Lupien Reference Lupien2011).Footnote 11 Although the rise of MAS also prompted erosion of formal democratic procedures, particularly with regard to horizontal accountability and the rule of law (Stoyan Reference Stoyan2020), these disruptions came later, most notably during the conflict surrounding the 2019 election process when both Morales and the anti-MAS opposition engaged in extra-institutional maneuvers that put Bolivian democracy at risk (Velasco Guachalla et al. Reference Velasco Guachalla, Hummel, Handlin and Smith2021). Despite these challenges, as well as MAS’s occasionally contentious relationships with some Indigenous groups and other grassroots organizations, the move toward greater equality for Indigenous Bolivians after 2005 is undeniable, and this change was accomplished through democratic processes (Postero Reference Postero2017; Wolff Reference Wolff2018).
Here we are interested in understanding how people’s support for democracy responded to this dramatic shift toward ethnoracial equality. Thus, we focus our analysis on the period immediately before and after the 2005 election, terminating the analysis well ahead of the turbulent period that surfaced in 2019. If we are correct that ethnoracial equality promotes democratic legitimacy, then we should observe stronger support for democracy in Bolivia after MAS ascended to power in 2005. Moreover, because our theory expects the consequences of ethnoracial hierarchies to reverberate throughout society, we should observe this pattern not only for Indigenous Bolivians who made clear gains, but also among the non-Indigenous.
To evaluate these expectations, we conduct regression analysis comparing Bolivian support for democracy as the best form of government in the years before and after MAS won control of government. (Our secondary dependent variable, support for basic democratic rights, is unavailable in AmericasBarometer surveys conducted before 2005.) The core independent variables are a dichotomous measure indicating before (0) and after (1) the 2005 election and an interaction between this variable and Indigenous identity. These measures enable us to assess whether support for democracy increases after the move toward greater ethnoracial equality and whether any changes in democratic support occur across Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous people. The model also includes a linear time trend to account for unmeasured temporal changes and the full battery of individual-level control variables included in the cross-national analysis above. We clustered standard errors by year to account for the possibility of correlated errors.
Figure 4 presents the relevant information from the analysis,Footnote 12 showing how support for democracy shifted in Bolivia after MAS gained power and ethnoracial hierarchy declined. The findings make clear that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Bolivians became significantly more likely to see democracy as the best form of government after this turn. Before the MAS victory, support for democracy among Bolivians was extremely low, falling below the average score in Peru, the country with the worst overall performance on this indicator. But after MAS gained power, attitudes concerning democracy shifted markedly, improving among the non-Indigenous, and even more so among Indigenous people, bringing Bolivians in line with Brazilians, who place above the regional median on this outcome.
Testing the Effect of Political Inclusion in Bolivia
To ensure that the effect we are attributing to the election of Evo Morales is not actually driven by other changes that happened over the same period, the analysis reported above includes a time trend as one strategy to avoid such a causal misattribution. In addition, we implemented a placebo test to strengthen the claim that the election of MAS increased support for democracy. In the placebo test (reported in figure K-1 in appendix K), we estimate the same model as the one reported here for Bolivia but now using data from other countries. If we see a similar effect in other countries, this would suggest that something other than the MAS victory produced the observed change in democratic attitudes in Bolivia. The placebo test shows that outside Bolivia there was no parallel increase in support for democracy among the Indigenous, providing further support for the conclusion that it was, in fact, the election of Evo Morales that increased support for democracy in this group in Bolivia. Placebo effects are also not statistically significant among the non-Indigenous outside Bolivia, meaning that a causal interpretation of the MAS victory is supported among non-Indigenous Bolivians as well. This analysis also provides evidence that there was not a broad-based backlash against democracy among the non-Indigenous after the MAS victory in 2005: the increase in support for democracy that we observed in Bolivia is not simply the result of other factors that could have produced a more general shift in favor of democracy throughout the region.
This evidence from Bolivia aligns with our core hypothesis that hierarchical systems undermine democratic legitimacy while greater ethnoracial equality can promote stronger support for democracy across society as a whole. Moreover, the results here suggest that moves to reduce ethnoracial hierarchies can occur without eroding mass support for democracy. Of course, elites who lose influence when historically marginalized groups gain power often respond in reactionary and even authoritarian ways: the backlash against MAS from traditionally powerful interests was fierce and overtly antidemocratic. But our analysis here suggests that shifts toward greater equality do not necessarily foment widespread public backing for antidemocratic strategies. Indeed, when Morales overstayed his constitutional term as president and his opponents managed to dislodge him, they overreached in their efforts to regain power and were repudiated at the polls in the 2020 election, which returned MAS (but not Morales) to power.
Discussion and Conclusions
Entrenched structural inequalities undermine democratic commitments not only among minoritized groups but also among more privileged ones. Across Latin America, where ethnoracial hierarchies are deeper, people from all ethnoracial groups are less committed to democracy and to protecting liberal democratic rights. Evidence from over-time analysis in Bolivia strengthens our understanding of this process by demonstrating that commitments to democracy become more robust following moves toward greater ethnoracial equality. These results support our core societal-level hypothesis.
These findings deepen our theoretical understanding in several ways. First, previous research tells us that ethnoracial hierarchies undermine solidarity and rationalize inequality and that these processes weaken public support for egalitarian distributions of material resources (Eger Reference Eger2010; Gilens [Reference Gilens1999] 2009; Lieberman and McClendon Reference Lieberman and McClendon2013; Morgan and Kelly Reference Morgan and Kelly2017). Here we show that the inegalitarian consequences of ethnoracial hierarchies extend to constraining people’s commitments to equal political rights through liberal democratic protections. Second, we add to studies examining the relationship between inequality and democratic legitimacy by providing evidence supporting democratic theorists’ expectations about the particularly harmful effects of inequalities that map onto group divides. Third, we join a growing body of work emphasizing that understanding the consequences of ethnoracial diversity requires consideration of the way heterogeneity is structured. Namely, systemic hierarchies that consistently privilege certain ethnoracial groups over others shape significant features of democratic politics, including the formation of policy attitudes (Morgan and Kelly Reference Morgan and Kelly2017) and the structure of partisan competition (Giusti-Rodríguez Reference Giusti-Rodríguez2024; Huber and Suryanarayan Reference Huber and Suryanarayan2016; Morgan, Hartlyn, and Espinal Reference Morgan, Hartlyn and Espinal2011), as well as public support for democracy as we show here.
In addition, the evidence indicates that structural group consciousness operates as a resource for minoritized group members, facilitating continued support for democracy even in the face of deep systemic exclusion. These results align with our theoretical expectation that structural group consciousness would moderate the consequences of hierarchy among Indigenous and Afrodescendant Latin Americans. The analysis also indicates that members of these minoritized groups are especially invested in respecting basic democratic rights, which may reflect recognition that these rights are particularly crucial for marginalized individuals who have fewer economic and political resources (Boulding and Holzner Reference Boulding and Holzner2021). The results highlight the complex ways that race and ethnicity matter for political attitudes and behavior in Latin America, emphasize how disentangling different dimensions of group consciousness can help us to better understand these dynamics, and affirm the relevance of ethnoracial group consciousness in contexts beyond the United States.
While our evidence is from Latin America, the findings may offer theoretical insights for other contexts where hierarchically organized ethnoracial divides persist within formally democratic polities—a recurrent phenomenon across parts of the Global South as well as many advanced democracies. Moreover, while we have focused here on the consequences of ethnoracial divides, it is possible that this theoretical framework could be relevant for hierarchies organized around other social divides as well. Thus, future research could fruitfully consider how systemic inequalities shape democratic legitimacy in other countries characterized by ethnoracial inequality and in contexts of structural hierarchies based on other kinds of group differences. We emphasize, however, that the theoretical argument developed here is focused on understanding how democracy is delegitimized by hierarchies that are entrenched, persistent, and systemic in nature. We would not necessarily expect the same deleterious consequences to follow from ethnoracial diversity alone or from inequalities that are more malleable, ephemeral, or isolated.
Our core finding—that persistent ethnoracial hierarchies undermine democratic legitimacy—gives cause for concern. In contexts of circumscribed or contingent democratic commitments, authoritarian populists have increasingly capitalized on the substantive failings of democracy (Morgan Reference Morgan2018; Roberts Reference Roberts2022). At the same time, democracy advocates have focused almost exclusively on reforming institutions and procedures—perhaps out of a concern that blurring the line between democratic processes and substantive outcomes only enhances the risk of a shift toward this kind of antidemocratic populism. But the evidence here suggests that reforming institutions while ignoring persistent ethnoracial hierarchies may fail to rejuvenate citizens’ commitments to democracy. Thus, the task of prodemocracy forces is to show that more egalitarian social and political outcomes can be accomplished through the procedures and protections offered by liberal democracy. Where and when that happens, citizen attitudes and behavior are more likely to adhere to democratic principles and produce a better habitat for stable and deeply rooted democratic regimes.
Supplementary material
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724002135.
Data Replication
Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GWDB2T.
Acknowledgments
For feedback on earlier drafts of this paper and the broader project of which it is a part, we thank Sarah Berens, Merike Blofield, Carew Boulding, Ryan Carlin, Gabriel Cepaluni, Danielle Clealand, Mollie Cohen, Danilo Contreras, Eduardo Dargent, Christina Ewig, Benjamin Gedan, Mariana Giusti-Rodríguez, Jonathan Hartlyn, Evelyne Huber, Calla Hummel, Marcus Johnson, Eunji Kim, Rithika Kumar, Laura López-Pérez, Raúl Madrid, Liz Markovits, Gabriela Marzonetto, Vincent Mauro, Gladys Mitchell-Walthour, Paula Muñoz, Tom Mustillo, Christopher Ojeda, Maritza Paredes, Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, Dianne Pinderhughes, Ricardo Ramírez, Natán Skigin, Ali Stoyan, Dara Strolovitch, Linda Tropp, Kris-Stella Trump, Julie Weaver, Simon Weschle, Jenny Wolak, Alice Xu, and writing groups at the Russell Sage Foundation and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. We are also grateful for comments from audiences at Cornell University, Grupo de Análisis para el Desarrollo (GRADE) in Lima, the University of Notre Dame, Rutgers University, University of California-Riverside, University of Miami, University of Pittsburgh, the Wilson Center, the 2023 American Political Science Association meeting, the 2023 Latin American Studies Association Congress, and the inaugural continental conference on Afro-Latin American Studies hosted by Harvard’s Afro-Latin American Research Institute. We are grateful to our interlocutors in the field, whose reflections were crucial in illuminating the patterns discussed here; to Alina Clay and Andrew Leming, who provided research assistance; and to Leah Christiani, whose ongoing collaboration has sharpened our thinking. We acknowledge funding from the University of Tennessee, which enabled fieldwork in Peru; Jana Morgan acknowledges support from fellowships at the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame and the Wilson Center in Washington, DC. We are grateful to the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) Lab at Vanderbilt University and its funders for access to the AmericasBarometer data. Finally, we thank the Perspectives editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive engagement with our work.
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