Amanda Lea Robinson

National Versus Ethnic Identification in Africa: Modernization, Colonial Legacy, and the Origins of territorial Nationalism

Communal conflicts, civil wars, and state collapse have led many to portray the notion of African nation-states as an oxymoron. Some scholars of African politics—often referred to as second-generation modernization theorists—have argued that strong ethnic attachments across the continent resulted from rapid economic and political modernization, the very forces credited with reducing parochial ties and consolidating European nations in classic modernization theory. Others have argued that national consolidation in Africa is particularly unlikely due to high degrees of ethnic diversity, colonial rule that exacerbated that diversity, and the partition of cultural groups. Despite the ubiquity of these arguments, there has been very little comparative empirical research on territorial nationalism in Africa. Using individual-level data from sixteen countries, combined with a novel compilation of ethnic group and state characteristics, the author evaluates the observable implications of these long-respected theoretical traditions within a multilevel framework. She finds that attachment to the nation, relative to one’s ethnic group, increases with education, urbanization, and formal employment at the individual level, and with economic development at the state level—patterns more consistent with classic modernization theory than with second-generation modernization theory. Thus, if modernization in Africa does indeed intensify ethnic attachment, the impact is overwhelmed by the concurrent increase in panethnic territorial nationalism. Similarly, the results show that ethnic diversity and the partition of ethnic groups by “artificial” state borders increase, rather than decrease, the degree to which individuals identify nationally. Taken together, these results reject pessimistic expectations of African exceptionalism and instead suggest that the emergence of widespread national identification within African states is not only possible but even increasingly likely with greater economic development.

Who's Asking? Interviewer Coethnicity Effects in African Survey Data

Face-to-face interviews constitute a social interaction between interviewer and respondent, and in the African context, social interactions are strongly shaped by ethnicity. Yet research using African survey data typically fails to account for the effect of shared ethnicity on survey responses. We find that respondents give systematically different answers to coethnic and noncoethnic interviewers across surveys in 14 African countries, but with significant variation in the degree of bias across question types and types of noncoethnic dyads, with the largest effects occurring where both the respondent and interviewer are members of ethnic groups with a history of political competition and conflict, and where the respondent or interviewer shares an ethnicity with the head of state. Our findings have practical implications for consumers of African survey data and underscore the context dependence of the social interaction that constitutes the survey experience.

Nationalism and Ethnic-Based Trust: Evidence From an African Border Region

In diverse societies, individuals tend to trust coethnics more than non-coethnics. I argue that identification with a territorially defined nation, common to all ethnic groups, reduces the degree to which trust is ethnically bounded. I conduct a “lab-in-the-field” experiment at the intersection of national and ethnic boundaries in Malawi, which measures strength of national identification, experimentally manipulates national identity salience, and measures trust behaviorally. I find that shared nationality is a robust predictor of trust, equal in magnitude to the impact of shared ethnicity. Furthermore, national identification moderates the degree to which trust is limited to coethnics: While weak national identifiers trust coethnics more than non-coethnics, strong national identifiers are blind to ethnicity. Experimentally increasing national identity salience also eliminates the coethnic trust advantage among weak nationalists. These results offer micro-level evidence that a strong and salient national identity can diminish ethnic barriers to trust in diverse societies.

Segregation, Ethnic Favoritism, and the Strategic Targeting of Local Public Goods:

This article demonstrates that ethnic segregation is a key determinant of local public goods provision. We argue that this results from politicians’ strategic engagement in ethnic favoritism: Only when ethnic groups are sufficiently segregated can elites efficiently target coethnics with local public goods. We test this expectation with fine-grained data from Malawi on the spatial distribution of ethnic groups, geolocated distributive goods (water wells), and the ethnic identities of political elites. We find that members of parliament provide more local public goods to their electoral districts when ethnic groups are geographically segregated but that this increased investment is primarily targeted toward coethnics. Thus, while segregation promotes overall public goods provision, it also leads to greater favoritism in the distribution of these goods. Our logic and evidence provide an elite-driven explanation for both the considerable variation in ethnic favoritism across contexts and the underprovision of public goods in ethnically diverse settings.

Ethnic Diversity, Segregation and Ethnocentric Trust in Africa

Ethnic diversity is generally associated with less social capital and lower levels of trust. However, most empirical evidence for this relationship is focused on generalized trust , rather than more theoretically appropriate measures of group-based trust . This article evaluates the relationship between ethnic diversity – at the national, regional and local levels – and the degree to which coethnics are trusted more than non-coethnics, a value referred to here as the ‘coethnic trust premium’. Using public opinion data from sixteen African countries, this study finds that citizens of ethnically diverse states express, on average, more ethnocentric trust. However, within countries, regional ethnic diversity is associated with less ethnocentric trust. This same negative pattern between diversity and ethnocentric trust appears across districts and enumeration areas within Malawi. The article then shows, consistent with these patterns, that diversity is only detrimental to intergroup trust at the national level when ethnic groups are spatially segregated. These results highlight the importance of the spatial distribution of ethnic groups on intergroup relations, and question the utility of micro-level studies of interethnic interactions for understanding macro-level group dynamics.

Nationalism and Social Sanctioning Across Ethnic Lines: Experimental Evidence from the Kenya–Tanzania Border

Past research shows that ethnic diversity reduces the ability to sanction norm violators, ultimately undermining cooperation. We test this directly by experimentally varying the ethnic composition of groups playing a dictator game with third-party punishment among two ethnic groups along the Kenya-Tanzania border. We also implement a structurally identical game where the endowment division is randomly determined in order to isolate a punishment motivation from the motivation to rectify income inequality. While costly income adjustment in both games is driven primarily by norm violations and inequality aversion, the ethnic composition of groups also influences sharing and sanctioning behavior in Kenya but not Tanzania, consistent with documented differences in the strength of nationalism across the two countries. However, the way in which shared ethnicity affects sanctioning in Kenya – namely increased punishment of outgroup violations against ingroup members – is at odds with theories that anticipate that costly sanctioning will primarily target coethnics. Societies require communally-determined standards of conduct – i.e., social norms – to function (Sober and Wilson 1998; Fehr and Fischbacher 2003; Richerson and Boyd 2005), and individuals thus sanction violations of those norms (Boyd and Richerson 1992), even when doing so is costly (Fehr and Gachter 2002; Fehr and Fischbacher 2004; Henrich et al. 2006). However, scholars have argued that enforcing social norms is more difficult in ethnicallydiverse communities because individuals are less willing or able to effectively sanction across ethnic lines (Fearon and Laitin 1996; Miguel and Gugerty 2005; Shinada et al. 2004; Habyarimana et al. 2009). We conduct experiments designed to test this directly, among members of two ethnic groups in East Africa, the Luo and the Kuria. Participants in our experiments completed dictator games with third-party punishment and random income games with third-party income adjustment. The latter game is structurally identical to the dictator game except that a randomizing device allocates income to players, thus allowing us to distinguish between the punishment of norm violators and efforts to reduce inequality. Random assignment to groups for each game generated variation in the ethnic make-up of experimental groups, which allowed us to identify shared ethnicity’s role in social sanctioning and inequality aversion. Furthermore, we conducted the behavioral games among members of the Luo and Kuria ethnolinguistic groups living on both sides of the Kenya-Tanzania border, to assess whether supra-ethnic nationalism can facilitate sanctioning across ethnic lines, ultimately improving cooperation in diverse settings. Because nationalism has been much stronger in Tanzania than Kenya (Barkan 1994; Miguel 2004), we expect that ethnic differences will be a greater barrier to cooperation and sanctioning in Kenya than in Tanzania. In general, we find that across all coethnicity treatments in both countries, the degree of norm violation and income inequality are by far the strongest and most robust predictors of costly sanctioning. We also report fairly weak but detectable differences in the degree to which ethnicity shapes sharing and (to a lesser degree) costly sanctioning, but only in Kenya. This suggests that Tanzania’s strong nationalism may indeed alleviate ethnic barriers to cooperation. However, the patterns of play suggest that when punishment is conditioned on 1 ethnicity, it tends to be focused on outgroup members who fail to share with the third party punisher’s coethnic. This is at odds with conventional political science theories of ethnic-based sanctioning, which anticipate that costly sanctioning will be reserved for ingroup members who violate social norms of cooperation with other ingroup members (Miguel and Gugerty 2005; Habyarimana et al. 2009). Research Design Our research design includes two behavioral economic games designed to separate distinct motivations for social sanctioning. Social sanctioning that is motivated by punishment of a norm violation is captured using a a classic dictator game with third party punishment (DG3) (Fehr and Fischbacher 2004), while the desire to rectify inequality is isolated using the random income game with third party income adjustment (RIG3), a modification of the game employed in Dawes et al. (2007). Each game has three roles – A, B, and C. The two games are depicted graphically in Figure 1. In the first stage of the DG3, A is endowed with 10 tokens and told that she can either keep the 10 tokens or she can divide them – in any manner – between herself and B. After A makes her decision, C is endowed with 5 tokens, informed of A’s sharing decision, and offered the opportunity to spend some of his 5 tokens to reduce the final income of A; for every 1 token C spent, A’s final income is reduced by 3 tokens. In this game, A’s decision about how much to share with B indicates adherence to a sharing norm, while C’s costly decision to punish indicates a willingness to sanction a norm violation. The RIG3 works exactly the same way except that the initial division of the 10 tokens between A and B is determined randomly rather than by A, and C has the opportunity to reduce the income of either A or B. As a result, in RIG3, C’s costly decision to adjust incomes is an indicator of inequality aversion. Following the framework of Bernhard et al. (2006), we also manipulated the ethnic makeup of the game partners in order to identify the impact of shared ethnicity on cooperation and social sanctioning in DG3 (and on inequality aversion in RIG3). We implemented these games 2 Dictator Game with Third Party Punishment (DG3)

Who is Targeted in Corruption? Disentangling the Effects of Wealth and Power on Exposure to Bribery

Who is Targeted in Corruption? Disentangling the Effects of Wealth and Power on Exposure to Bribery