Activating the ‘Big Man’: Status and Pro-Social Behavior in African Bureaucracy

• In Event: Understanding State Institutional Variation in Africa

Abstract

Why is public goods delivery by African states often particularistic, favoring ethnic, personal or political networks of those inside the state over universalistic, pro-social services to citizens? One prominent scholarly response has been to focus on the prevalence of societal patronage norms, with ‘Big Men’ providing for members of their networks. Despite the prominence of this line of reasoning and the anecdotal prevalence of "Big Men" in African politics and society, hardly any research has quantitively assessed the effects of ‘Big Man’ cultures inside African states. Through a behavioural lab-in-the-field experiment with over 1,000 Ugandan bureaucrats, our paper addresses part of this gap. In the experiment, we prime bureaucrats about their social status and assess how this affects their pro-social giving. We find that social status primes significantly reduce pro-social behavior, but that this effect is entirely driven by bureaucrats embedded in patronage networks. In other words, activating status – that is ‘big man’ – identities in bureaucrats embedded in patronage networks significantly curbs their pro-social behavior. Our paper thus contributes an important bureaucratic identity micro-foundation to help explain the limited universalistic, pro-social service delivery in African states.

Authors

• Christian Schuster, University College London

• Adam Harris, University College London

• Kim Sass Mikkelsen, Department of Political Science and Government, Aarhus University

• Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling, University of Nottingham