THE SPATIAL INEQUALITIES IN AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY PROJECT
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  • People and Partners
    • People
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  • Overview
  • Research and Publications
    • 1. Regional Inequalities and African Electoral Coalitions
    • 2. Internal Borders and the Building-Blocs of Territorialized Representation
    • 3. Regional Inequalities and Competing Policy Preferences: Land Titling
    • 4. The Kenya Settlement Scheme Project
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​Internal Borders and the Building-Blocs of Territorialized Representation in African Countries

Overview

This stream tackles the puzzle of the persistence of territorialized ethnic communities as the building-blocks of inequality-driven partisan and regional coalitions in African countries.

It tests three hypotheses:

1. The vast majority of these boundaries were originally demarcated as internal ethnic boundaries by colonial rulers in the pre-independence period.

2.  Long-established internal boundaries create jurisdictions that are marked by high levels of cross-unit economic and political inequality (in natural endowment [land, rainfall], proxy wealth indicators, infrastructure, and local state [tax] capacity) and low levels of within-unit partisan political competition (measured since the post-1990 return to multipartism).

3. Internal borders and territorialized subnational citizenship thus work to "lock-in" electoral constituencies (often grouped into localized coalitions or blocs) that are characterized by extremely high levels of economic inequality.
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The Gold Coast - Native States.
1:014. Accra, Gold Coast: Survey H.Q., 1946.

Publications

​Journal Article:
Bolt, Jutta and Leigh Gardner. "How Africans shaped British colonial institutions: evidence from local taxation," Journal of Economic History (forthcoming). Working paper version available here.
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Jutta Bolt and Leigh Gardner. "How Africans shaped British colonial institutions: evidence from local taxation," Journal of Economic History (forthcoming).
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Uganda Protectorate: Political.
1:3,500,000. Uganda Survey Dept., 1935.
Contact:
PI Catherine Boone
c.boone@lse.ac.uk
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  • Home
  • People and Partners
    • People
    • Partners
  • Overview
  • Research and Publications
    • 1. Regional Inequalities and African Electoral Coalitions
    • 2. Internal Borders and the Building-Blocs of Territorialized Representation
    • 3. Regional Inequalities and Competing Policy Preferences: Land Titling
    • 4. The Kenya Settlement Scheme Project
  • Posters