Download This PaperColonial Education, Political Elites, and Regional Political Inequality in Africa
Comparative Political Studies
73 Pages Posted: 29 Apr 2020 Last revised: 3 Apr 2021
Date Written: December 21, 2020
Abstract
Political elites tend to favor their home region when distributing resources. But what explains how political power is distributed across a country’s regions to begin with? Explanations of cabinet formation focus on short-term strategic bargaining and some emphasize that ministries are allocated equitably to minimize conflict. Using new data on the cabinet members (1960-2010) of 16 former British and French African colonies, I find that some regions have been systematically much more represented than others. Combining novel historical and geospatial records, I show that this regional political inequality derives not from colonial-era development in general but from colonial-era education in particular. I argue that post-colonial ministers are partly a byproduct of civil service recruitment practices among European administrators that focused on levels of literacy. Regional political inequality is an understudied pathway through which colonial legacies impact distributive politics and unequal development in Africa today.
Keywords: political elites, cabinets, colonialism, education, regional inequality, Africa
JEL Classification: F54, I26, N37, N47
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