Modern India is a political creation. The citizens of the world’s most populous country speak 100 languages, practice eight major religions, and belong to over 700 tribal groups and thousands of castes. The challenge of democratically representing such a range of interests is compounded by deep material scarcity and striking economic and social inequality.

Latin America continues to provide a fertile hunting ground for students of comparative politics. There is plentiful variation between, within, and across countries and subsectors. Yet, there are also shared scope conditions, cultural and institutional commonalities, and region-wide interactions and demonstration effects. There are some areas where comparisons can be based on either the “most similar” or the “most different” system design, but most causal variables of real interest are imprecise, unstable, and mutually interactive. They often operate within discontinuous and unstable political systems that evade mechanistic modeling. Temporal discontinuities and compartmentalized sectors can be so prevalent that “kaleidoscopic” patterns may seem more typical than smoothly institutionalized regularities or predictable convergences.

Following the independence of African countries in the 1960s and 1970s, many newly minted politicians and political scientists who studied them directed their attention to the effects of ethnic identities, heterogeneity, rivalries, and alliances on African politics. In the aftermath of colonial violence and social engineering, ethnic competition contributed to violent secessionist movements, and ethnic hatred sometimes fueled genocide. Many African governments expelled minorities and banned ethnic parties, established federal institutions, and at times adopted nationalist rhetoric to punish rivals or mitigate the deleterious outcomes of ethnic conflict. As Christof Hartmann summarizes, “political regulation of ethnicity has been a core dimension of state-building in Africa” (“Managing Ethnicity in African Politics,” in Nic Cheeseman, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Politics, 2019: 1).