Replication Data for: Precolonial Legacies and Institutional Congruence in Public Goods Delivery: Evidence from Decentralized West Africa

Abstract

Scholars have long identified political bias in how African politicians distribute state resources. Though much of this literature focuses on the role of group identities, centrally ethnicity and partisanship, this article shifts focus to local governments, increasingly important players in basic social service provision, to argue that public goods allocation under democratic decentralization is intimately shaped by historical identities. Specifically, I highlight the role of identities rooted in the precolonial past. To explain this, the article articulates a theory of institutional congruence, arguing that greater spatial overlap between formal institutional space and informal social identities improves the ability of elites to overcome local coordination problems. Looking to the West African state of Senegal, I deploy a nested analysis, drawing on interviews with rural Senegalese elites to understand how the precolonial past shapes local politics today via the social identities it left behind. I secondly test the argument with a unique, geocoded dataset of village level public goods investments in the 2000s, finding that areas that were home to precolonial states distribute goods more broadly across space. These patterns cannot be explained by ethnic or electoral dynamics. Finally, two brief case studies of on-the-line cases illuminate how the presence of precolonial identities facilitates local cooperation. The article thus calls into question our ability to treat identities as static over time by highlighting the interactive relationship between institutions and identities while at the same time drawing attention to emerging sub-national variation in local government performance following decentralization reforms across the developing world