17
using noneconomic cleavages such as ethnicity? This is the all-important question of group
salience.18
A second — and in our view important — line of progress is to endogenize individual at-
titudes, possibly in a dynamic model. One of the effects of proposals that we may judge as
“extreme” today is that, by the mere fact of having been put forward, they become more ac-
ceptable tomorrow. It might well be that a moderate or a radical attitude is not absolute, but
relative to what is being on the table today. This process might generate dynamics interesting to
investigate. Finally, the gain from conflict should be made to include economic benefits as well
as psychological ethnic pay-offs. Higher economic resources provide more means to confront
the others, but it also provides a more attactive bounty to the other party in case of victory.
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18Robinson (2001) presents a model in which conflict can take place either along class lines or along ethnic lines and
shows that the latter will in general be more severe than the former. But this paper does not address the question of
salience directly, choosing instead to compare two different forms of conflict.