Abstract
AbstractEmpirical studies show that many governments gear the provision of goods and services towards their ethnic peers. This article investigates governments’ strategies to provide ethnic favors in Africa. Recent studies of ethnic favoritism find that presidents' ethnic peers and home regions enjoy advantages, yet cannot disentangle whether goods are provided to entire regions or co-ethnic individuals. This article argues that local ethnic demography determines whether governments provide non-excludable public goods or more narrowly targeted handouts. Where government co-ethnics are in the majority, public goods benefit all locals regardless of their ethnic identity. Outside of these strongholds, incumbents pursue discriminatory strategies and only their co-ethnics gain from favoritism. Using fine-grained geographic data on ethnic demographics, the study finds support for the argument's implications in the local incidence of infant mortality. These findings have important implications for theories of distributive politics and conflict in multi-ethnic societies.
Highlights
A large body of research shows that where ethnicity is a salient political cleavage, governments often gear the provision of goods and services towards their ethnic peers (Burgess et al 2015; Dreher et al 2019; Franck and Rainer 2012; Hodler and Raschky 2014; Jablonski 2014; Kimenyi 2006; Kramon and Posner 2016)
If targeting is purely individual, citizens only benefit when their ethnic peers are in power, while if ethnic favoritism follows a regional logic, government co-ethnics and non-co-ethnics benefit in co-ethnic strongholds but not elsewhere
While infant mortality rates plausibly capture various types of government-provided goods, they do not allow us to distinguish excludable private from non-excludable public goods directly. We address this shortcoming by (1) testing whether individual-level ethnic favoritism is apparent within DHS survey clusters and (2) analyzing crosssectional data on local public services provision from the Afrobarometer surveys
Summary
A large body of research shows that where ethnicity is a salient political cleavage, governments often gear the provision of goods and services towards their ethnic peers (Burgess et al 2015; Dreher et al 2019; Franck and Rainer 2012; Hodler and Raschky 2014; Jablonski 2014; Kimenyi 2006; Kramon and Posner 2016). This effect only holds in districts where the governing ethnic groups are in the minority at the time of birth, suggesting the provision of individually targeted benefits to government co-ethnics. The higher the costs of providing targeted benefits to co-ethnic individuals, the more governments will rely on public goods spending in increasingly mixed districts to sway non-co-ethnic minorities.
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