Why Do Different Cultures Form and Persist in a Shared Institutional Environment? Learning from a Natural Experiment at Makerere University

Abstract

Culture is a central concept in the social sciences, but it is often conflated with institutions. Conceptually, I argue that culture and institutions greatly overlap but are distinct. Empirically, I study the oldest university in East Africa and a cradle of political elites, Makerere University, where halls of residence developed distinct cultures in the 1970s such that some hall cultures are activist while others are respectful to authorities even though assignment to halls has been random since 1970. I leverage this unique setting to understand how culture forms and affects the values and behaviors of young elites living in a shared institutional environment. Participant observation, interviews, and archives suggest that cultural differences arose from critical junctures that biased group/hall composition and from intergroup/interhall competition. Hall governments promote cultural and institutional persistence through the intergenerational transmission of norms and practices, thereby highlighting the role of political hierarchy in reproducing culture.