backing the ussr 2.0Herbert Blumer and scholars who further developed his approach
(Blumer 1958; Bobo and Hutchings 1996; Fetzer 2000; McLaren
2003), that Russia’s expansion into predominantly ethnic Russian
territories of the former Soviet Union poses a threat to the ethnic
minorities’ group position. The incorporation of new ethnic
Russian populations – as in the case of Crimea – means that,
collectively, ethnic minorities become less numerous relative
to ethnic Russians. Ultimately, this diminution of status would
mean diminution of bargaining power for finite state- controlled
resources (Blumer 1958). The sense of threat to group position
could also be aggravated by fears of labour market competition
if the newly acquired territories of a hypothetically expanding
state are seen as poorer, prospective migrant- sending areas (Olzak
1992). That could apply to concentrated ethnic Russian settle-
ments in Ukraine, including Crimea. If this logic stands, then we
would expect ethnic minorities to oppose Russia’s enlargement.
Yet, the same instrumentalist logic may also predict – when
extrapolated to expansionist majority nationalism – that threat
to their group position would induce ethnic minorities to be more
loyal, not less, to the rulers of the expanding state. Formal models
and case studies have demonstrated that individuals identify with
a group if they care about the status of that group (Shayo 2009),
and that individuals assess the payoffs of siding with ingroups or
outgroups – including ethnicity versus nation – based on gains
from their social environment (Laitin 1998; Sambanis and Shayo
2013). Therefore, the more the perceived status of one’s group
diminishes, the more individual members of the minority groups
may be drawn to compensate with a stronger expression of loyalty
to the majority. In other words, they could draw more on their
loyalty capital to offset the reduction of their material leverage
capital. This would, for example, be the logic of a religious out-
sider seeking acceptance in a Catholic society by behaving as if
she were ‘holier than the Pope’. In fact, rigorous analysis of voting
behaviour shows that voters systematically support candidates of
ethnic groups other than their own in precincts where the candi-
date’s ethnic group is more numerous (Ichino and Nathan 2013).
More broadly, in ethnic politics, this response would be consist-
ent with the logic of defection under uncertainty about group