Weak States and the Roots of Ethnic Identification in Africa
Existing research on ethnicity in comparative politics has focused on the consequences of salient ethnic identities, largely ignoring the factors that strengthen or weaken group identities. I study the determinants of ethnic and national identification in Kenya, with a particular focus on the role of the state. Employing a social-psychological theory of identity formation, I argue that state service provision acts as a reminder of one’s national identity, weakening the subnational ethnic identities with which it competes. I use a new measurement approach, coupled with survey and natural experiments, to show that the receipt of state services reduces the favoritism that individuals show toward their coethnics. My research highlights the importance of broader societal characteristics, such as state weakness, in explaining the continued centrality of ethnicity in African politics.
Job market paper - "Weak States and the Roots of Ethnic Identification"
PUBLICATIONS
"Disasters and Elections: Estimating the Net Effect of Damage and Relief in Historical Perspective." Political Analysis (forthcoming). With Boris Heersink and Jeffery A. Jenkins.
Supplemental Appendix
"Against the Grain of Urban Bias: Elite Conflict and the Logic of Coalition Formation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa." Studies in Comparative International Development (forthcoming). With David Waldner and Jon Shoup.
Working Paper Version
"Measuring the Vice-Presidential Home State Advantage with Synthetic Controls." 2016. American Politics Research 44 (4): 734-763. With Boris Heersink.
Media Coverage: Monkey Cage; LSE USAPP Blog; Bloomberg; Christian Science Monitor; 538; New York Times; Newsweek; NPR; US News & World Report; Chicago Tribune
Supplemental Appendix
Additional Materials - Synth Plots, Additional Tables
"Doctors With Borders: Occupational Licensing as an Implicit Barrier to High-Skill Migration." 2014. Public Choice 160 (1-2): 45-63. With Sonal S. Pandya and David Leblang
Media coverage: Virginia Insight (NPR); Slate; The Monkey Cage
Working Paper Version
Supplemental Appendix
WORKING PAPERS and WORKS IN PROGRESS
"Kikuyu or Kenyan? Government Service Provision and the Salience of Ethnic Identities." Under review.
"Truman Defeats Dewey: The Effect of Campaign Visits on Election Outcomes." With Boris Heersink. Revise & Resubmit.
Supplemental Appendix
"Social Identification and In-Group Favoritism: Measuring the Strength of Group Ties"
Suppemental Appendix
"The Ethnic Power Relations Data: A Critique."
Existing research on ethnicity in comparative politics has focused on the consequences of salient ethnic identities, largely ignoring the factors that strengthen or weaken group identities. I study the determinants of ethnic and national identification in Kenya, with a particular focus on the role of the state. Employing a social-psychological theory of identity formation, I argue that state service provision acts as a reminder of one’s national identity, weakening the subnational ethnic identities with which it competes. I use a new measurement approach, coupled with survey and natural experiments, to show that the receipt of state services reduces the favoritism that individuals show toward their coethnics. My research highlights the importance of broader societal characteristics, such as state weakness, in explaining the continued centrality of ethnicity in African politics.
Job market paper - "Weak States and the Roots of Ethnic Identification"
PUBLICATIONS
"Disasters and Elections: Estimating the Net Effect of Damage and Relief in Historical Perspective." Political Analysis (forthcoming). With Boris Heersink and Jeffery A. Jenkins.
Supplemental Appendix
"Against the Grain of Urban Bias: Elite Conflict and the Logic of Coalition Formation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa." Studies in Comparative International Development (forthcoming). With David Waldner and Jon Shoup.
Working Paper Version
"Measuring the Vice-Presidential Home State Advantage with Synthetic Controls." 2016. American Politics Research 44 (4): 734-763. With Boris Heersink.
Media Coverage: Monkey Cage; LSE USAPP Blog; Bloomberg; Christian Science Monitor; 538; New York Times; Newsweek; NPR; US News & World Report; Chicago Tribune
Supplemental Appendix
Additional Materials - Synth Plots, Additional Tables
"Doctors With Borders: Occupational Licensing as an Implicit Barrier to High-Skill Migration." 2014. Public Choice 160 (1-2): 45-63. With Sonal S. Pandya and David Leblang
Media coverage: Virginia Insight (NPR); Slate; The Monkey Cage
Working Paper Version
Supplemental Appendix
WORKING PAPERS and WORKS IN PROGRESS
"Kikuyu or Kenyan? Government Service Provision and the Salience of Ethnic Identities." Under review.
"Truman Defeats Dewey: The Effect of Campaign Visits on Election Outcomes." With Boris Heersink. Revise & Resubmit.
Supplemental Appendix
"Social Identification and In-Group Favoritism: Measuring the Strength of Group Ties"
Suppemental Appendix
"The Ethnic Power Relations Data: A Critique."
"Weak States and the Roots of Ethnic Identification: Evidence from northern Kenya"
- Despite an extensive literature exploring the effects, boundaries of, and solutions to ethnic politics, scholars of African politics know little about the source of ethnicity’s salience on the continent. Why is ethnic identity so important to so many Africans? I theorize the importance of a fundamental feature of postcolonial Africa: weak states, unable to provide basic public services across their territories. I argue that state service provision can reduce the salience of ethnic identities by strengthening competing national identities. Where the state is absent, ethnic identities remain entrenched. Using a survey-based measure of ethnic identification, I test this hypothesis in Kenya, where ethnic identities are highly salient. My primary results exploit quasi-random assignment to a government cash transfer program in northern Kenya; I find that recipients of a bi-monthly cash transfer exhibit lower levels of ethnic identification than comparable members of their communities. The results illustrate the importance of state action in overcoming parochial subnational identities and have implications for the study of both African and ethnic politics.
"National Identity and Support for Public Goods Provision to Ethnic Outgroups"
- Identity politics structure political competition in much of the world. To what extent do group identities shape political preferences? Several recent articles suggest the impact of religious, national and ethnic identity salience on political attitudes. I report the results of two survey experiments implemented in Kenya, each of which was designed to manipulate the salience of national and ethnic identities. Surprisingly, I find no effect of priming either group identity. Increasing the salience of national group identity does not increase support for public goods provision to ethnic outgroups, and increasing the salience of ethnic group identity does not decrease said support. The results call into question findings from studies that rely on manipulating the salience of group identities, and suggest the need for more thoughtful research design in this literature.
"Bureaucrats as Patrons: Administrative Chiefs and Clan-biased Resource Distribution in northen Kenya"
- A vast literature on clientelism assumes that politicians distribute resources strategically in an effort to win votes. Can clientelism serve non-political ends? I study the distribution of patronage under circumstances in which there is no political incentive to engage in the practice. Specifically, I study low-level bureaucrats, assistant chiefs, in one of Kenya’s northern counties. Unelected, few have any ambitions for political office, so there is little reason to believe that they would engage in systematic identity-based discrimination or group-favoring patronage, as politicians in Kenya are known to do. Based on a census of clan and ethnic ties in Saku Constituency, consisting of over 7,000 households, and administrative data, I show that chiefs tilted resource distribution within their domains toward members of their own clans. These findings move the literature on patronage beyond the study of national-level executives and legislators; in the process, I provide evidence for a non-political logic to patronage.
"Natural Disasters and Partisan Retrospection in Election Campaigns." With Boris Heersink and Jeffery A. Jenkins.
- Political science research investigating whether natural disasters help or hurt politicians' electoral fortunes has produced conflicting results. Achen and Bartels (2002, 2016) argue that voters punish elected officials indiscriminately in the wake of a natural disaster – relying on "blind retrospection." Others have argued that voters incorporate elected officials' subsequent relief efforts in their assessment and instead rely on "attentive retrospection." In this paper, we argue that an additional consideration might also affect voters’ response to natural disasters: the partisan affiliation of an elected official. We look for evidence of "partisan retrospection" by examining the effects of Hurricane Sandy on the 2012 presidential election, and find that voters in affected counties that were safely Democratic rewarded incumbent President Barack Obama, while those in affected counties that were safely Republican punished him. We explore this hypothesis in a more systematic way by investigating disasters and presidential elections between 1972 and 2004, using data collected by Gasper and Reeves (2011). We find that voters in counties that are strongly partisan in the direction of an incumbent president reward him following disasters, while voters in counties strongly partisan in the opposite direction neither reward nor punish.
"Personal or Party Rewards? Electoral Effects of Credit Attribution for Local Development Projects." With Sarah Andrews.
- How do African citizens arrive at their voting decisions? A common view among political scientists asserts that citizens respond to the provision of particularistic benefits by supporting politicians who provide such benefits. In the context of Africa’s patronage-based polities, centered on distribution of state resources, the expectation that voters reward politicians for the provision of local goods is particularly compelling. But do voters actually reward politicians in this manner? And are the electoral benefits of distributive politics limited to the politicians who provide benefits to voters, or do they influence the electoral fortunes of adjacent co-partisan politicians? We study this question in the context of the 2017 Kenyan General Election, using survey experiments to determine whether voters reward politicians who provide local public goods. We extend the study of local goods provision by studying spillover effects in credit attribution, assessing whether credit flows to other non-responsible politicians along party lines or whether voters blindly reward all incumbents for their good fortune. Our results have potential implications for the effect of fiscal decentralization on Africa's weak party systems and the cultivation of a "personal vote" by elected representatives.
"Fisher's Randomization Inference Under the Weak Null Hypothesis"
- Randomization inference allows researchers to perform exact inference free of parametric assumptions and in samples drawn without reference to a specific population. However, randomization inference is limiting in the sense that it restricts inference to the sharp null hypothesis, or “no treatment effect for all units.” The null of broader interest, in contrast, typically concerns the average treatment effect. I show that randomization inference is readily extensible to this “weak” null hypothesis, allowing us to perform more valuable inference in experimental and quasi-experimental settings with all the benefits of Fisher’s original method. A series of monte carlo simulations illustrate the value of the approach and test its performance—in terms of type I and type II error—relative to parametric alternatives.
