Stream 1: Regional Inequalities and the Shaping of African Electoral Competition: Political Geography of Electoral Dominance and Electoral Coalitions in Africa
Research on African voting has uncovered highly regionalized patterns of partisanship across the continent. However, understanding of how regionalized parties build nationalized coalitions to manufacture national minorities remains a largely unsettled issue. Previous political science work has systematically attributed regional-level electoral cleavages to identity politics and ethnic difference, and insisted on the lack of programmatic policy differences across parties. This stream identifies a partisan coalition lock-in effect that favors economically-dominant regions. It suggests that better policy outcomes may require institutional solutions that enhance the effective representation of marginalized regions in national legislatures, rather than rhetorical shifts to downplay ethnicity or amplify national policy appeals. Our preliminary results challenge this conventional wisdom and suggest very different, more geopolitical and interest-based interpretations of the dynamics that underlie partisan coalition-building, dominance, and cleavage.
Stream 2: Internal Borders and the Building-Blocs of Territorialized Representation in African Countries
This stream tackles the puzzle of why territorialized ethnic communities have remained the building-blocks of regional coalitions in African countries. It locates the historical origins of internal territorial divisions in colonial systems of indirect rule which helped reinforce economic and political inequalities. Interactions between indigenous elites and colonial governments in building these systems helped shape the institutional landscape of many African countries This stream builds on literatures in history and economics which examine the legacies of indigenous and colonial institutions for patterns of economic development, and contributes new archival data and innovative methods of spatial analysis.
Stream 3: Regional Inequalities and Competing Economic and Institutional Preferences: Land Titling and Devolution
This stream provides evidence that the costs and risks of major policy initiatives are likely to be distributed highly unevenly across subnational regions, as well as plausible evidence that partisan politics around these policies cleaves along regional lines in the predicted ways. The analysis directs attention to the regionally-specific economic and livelihood issues at stake in the land policy choices, and their strongly distributive and redistributive nature. The expected results will challenge prevailing views about the determining role of cultural identity in shaping policy rivalry in African countries and will provide the basis for better understanding the costs and risks of policy, both political and economic. In the land policy area, findings may support policy recommendations in favor of regionally-specific land titling measures (bucking the default assumption of, and preference for, national policy uniformity), given our (expected) finding of high levels of de facto demand for such policies in some subnational regions of several African countries and high levels of resistance to individual titling in others.
Stream 4: The Kenya Settlement Scheme Project
This research stream brings together strands of the foregoing to underscore the variable ways in which land is an economic and political resource that rulers can use to mitigate territorial inequalities, build partisan coalitions, and pursue development policies. It builds upon a unique Kenya settlement scheme data set and map collection obtained from the Survey of Kenya which were compiled by Fibian Lukalo of the National Land Commission of Kenya in 2016 and 2017 (1350 sheets covering 350 schemes in 29 districts, from 1962-2016), and georeferenced and mapped by our team members at the National Land Commission in Nairobi and the Spatial Analysis Lab at the University of Richmond. We use this to identify and analyze regional logics that inform national planners' land allocation, electoral constituency-building, partisan coalition-building, and agricultural development strategies.
Using the Kenya data, we plan to test hypotheses about how rulers may mitigate or reinforce subnational social and territorial inequalities through land allocation and population-movement policies, and about the political and economic drivers of change in rulers' priorities over time. Our data allows us to systematically map the locations of almost 500 official settlement schemes created in Kenya between 1960-2010. There are stark policy implications (warning signals) for current donor-funded government policies in Kenya which aim to speed-up resettlement, link project schedules to the timing of national elections, and choose settlement locations according to ruling party constituency-building needs. Donors that fall into overly technocratic modes of problem-solving may miss these connections, and may thus be unprepared for the political ramifications and fall-out.
Using the Kenya data, we plan to test hypotheses about how rulers may mitigate or reinforce subnational social and territorial inequalities through land allocation and population-movement policies, and about the political and economic drivers of change in rulers' priorities over time. Our data allows us to systematically map the locations of almost 500 official settlement schemes created in Kenya between 1960-2010. There are stark policy implications (warning signals) for current donor-funded government policies in Kenya which aim to speed-up resettlement, link project schedules to the timing of national elections, and choose settlement locations according to ruling party constituency-building needs. Donors that fall into overly technocratic modes of problem-solving may miss these connections, and may thus be unprepared for the political ramifications and fall-out.
