Regions of State: Spatial Inequality and Political Regionalism in Africa

• In Event: Spatial Dimensions of Inequality

Abstract

Although urban-rural inequalities are the focus of some important theoretical innovations in African political economy, political science research on Africa shows little awareness of spatial inequalities across rural regions. When regional inequality is recognised, it commonly interpreted as a politically-induced distortion of an underlying state-of-nature that is characterized by socio-economic homogeneity (equality) across rural regions. Many political scientists, looking through the prism of theories of ethnic bias and favouritism, have seen regional economic inequality as a consequence of ethnic favouritism in national politics, which only serves to heighten ethnicity's political salience at the expense of more sober political debate centered on substantive policy issues. Spatial inequality, its causes, and its effects are all taken as symptoms of the ethnic politics disease.

The empirical sections of the paper invert these arguments, giving the economic geography drivers of spatial (regional) inequality pride of place in an analysis of regional inequalities and political regionalism in African countries. I document the extent of regional economic inequality across a sample of 12 African countries and, drawing on earlier work (Boone et al., 2022), show that (a.) regional difference corresponds to variation in regional productive structure that dates to the mid colonial period (the 1940s), and (b.) that regional voting blocs, shaped by the interaction effects of spatial inequality and institutional design (Rogers 2016), tend to emerge in economically-leading regions. The opportunistic, clientelistic voting alignments that are featured in many theories of African electoral politics are characteristic of economically-lagging and marginal regions. This suggests, inter alia, that postcolonial politicized ethnicity and ethnic politics are perhaps better understood as the consequence or political expression of regional economic inequalities and uneven development, rather than as a stand-alone cause of spatial economic inequality. If so, then the economic geography factors -- and how these are institutionalized in country-level rules of resource access, and territorial administration, and political representation -- may be far more important in defining national trajectories than previously understood.

Concluding paragraphs of the paper draw out the implications of these arguments for understanding politics and policy debates in African countries.

Author

• Catherine Boone, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)