Colonial Origins of the State: Bureaucratic Embeddedness and Public Goods

• In Event: Historical Political Economy

Abstract

Electoral incentives shape the allocation of public goods (Alesina et al, 1999; Baldwin, 2013) and the assignment of the bureaucrats that deliver these goods (Golden, 2003, Toral, 2019). Yet in many African countries that experienced European colonization, historical legacies directly influence the modern state. I argue that geographic and demographic patterns in historical bureaucracies’ impact modern bureaucracies today. These legacies reflect modern variations in “bureaucratic embeddedness” – how well particular ethno-regional groups are represented in state agencies – that has consequences for the provision of public goods. I use a century’s data on the Nigerian bureaucracy to trace how British colonial leaders built the bureaucratic state and how they did and did not incorporate certain indigenous Nigerian groups into the civil service. Those groups that were first brought into the service by the British remain more likely to occupy service positions in the pre-independence, post-independence, and modern democratic periods. Strikingly, this historical legacy appears to only weakly influence allocation of public goods projects but has clear consequences for the completion of said projects. Groups that were historically (and thus presently) highly represented in the civil service see greater completion rates of projects allocated to them than those that were not included in the periods of state building.

Author

• Ada Johnson-Kanu, University of California, Merced