Institutions, Context, and Outcomes: Explaining French and British Rule in West Africa

Abstract

Why did Ivory Coast and Ghana adopt such different economic policies? In the 1950s Ivory Coast and Ghana shared a similar economic structure, based largely on coffee and cocoa production, and similar levels of economic development. Yet with independence Ivory Coast's Houphouet-Boigny embraced capitalism, implementing export-oriented policies favorable to the agrarian sector, while Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah espoused socialism, implementing import substitution industrialization policies favorable to the urban sector.l What explains this divergence? In answering this query, scholars have typically focused on each nation's class structure.2 In Ivory Coast Houphouet-Boigny's Parti Democratique de Cote d'lvoire (PDCI) mobilized the agrarian elite. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah's Convention Peoples Party (CPP) depended upon the urban petty bourgeoisie. Though important, this account is incomplete because it does not explain why the two nations possessed such different class structures. The explanation refocuses, but does not answer, the empirical question. I seek to solve this puzzle by tracing the origin of class formation in Ivory Coast's and Ghana's rural areas. Specifically, French and British colonial institutions generated different property rights and landholding patterns, forming the basis for different patterns of class formation. The link between institutions and outcomes is complex, however. Institutions define what actions are required, prohibited, or permitted for a given class of actors in a given situation and how these actions will be rewarded or penalized.3 In theory, institutions generate predictable patterns of behavior.4 In reality, analysts and policymakers are often surprised by institutions' impact. Indeed, French colonial institutions did not universally create a landed elite, as they did in Ivory Coast, and British institutions did not always create a small peasantry, as they did in Ghana. The colonial institutions' impact is contingent upon the interaction between colonial and indigenous institutions and the institutions' joint impact upon state actors (here, indigenous chiefs), upon the institutions' indirect effect upon social actors (here, the chiefs' subjects), and upon all actors' ability to evade and undermine colonial institutions. Institutions have unintended consequences, first, because actors work within multiple sets of institutions.5 Actions rewarded under one institutional arrangement may be penalized under a second, or actions permitted under one institutional arrangement may interfere with actions more highly rewarded under a second. In these cases, an actor's behavior depends upon the way in which he or she balances these competing pressures.