The Political Consequences of Language Policy for State Developments

• In Event: Language Politics in State- and Nation-building

Abstract

All states interact with their citizens through the medium of an official administrative language. Whereas official languages emerged in early modern Europe as part of explicit state- and nation-building policies, the choice of an official language often preceded such efforts in postcolonial states. We argue that in multilinguistic societies, the choice of an official language affects state development by facilitating or impeding citizen interactions with the state. Individuals that do not speak the official language face higher transaction costs in their encounters with government bureaucrats that discourage them from accessing services and complying with state regulations. We test these arguments using two difference-in-differences designs leveraging within-country variation in Ethiopia and between-country variation in sub-Saharan Africa. Our results demonstrate the important explanatory role of language as a barrier to interacting with the state. They also suggest an important modification to the conventional understanding of diversity and state weakness that privileges the mechanisms of social trust and political loyalty. This paper points to an alternative mechanism: it is the selection of an official administrative language rather than diversity per se that slows the state’s penetration of society and impedes interactions between the governors and the governed.

Authors

• Melissa M. Lee, Princeton University

• Rajesh Ramachandran, Heidelberg University

• Nan Zhang, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods