Replication Data for Colonial Education, Political Elites, and Regional Political Inequality in Africa

Political elites tend to favor their home region when distributing resources. But what explains how political power is distributed across a country's regions to begin with? Explanations of cabinet formation focus on short-term strategic bargaining and some emphasize that ministries are allocated equitably to minimize conflict. Using new data on the cabinet members (1960-2010) of 16 former British and French African colonies, I find that some regions have been systematically much more represented than others. Combining novel historical and geospatial records, I show that this regional political inequality derives not from colonial-era development in general but from colonial-era education in particular. I argue that post-colonial ministers are partly a byproduct of civil service recruitment practices among European administrators that focused on levels of literacy. Regional political inequality is an understudied pathway through which colonial legacies impact distributive politics and unequal development in Africa today.

政治精英在分配资源时往往会偏袒其家乡所在区域。但究竟是什么因素，决定了一国范围内各区域间的政治权力分配格局？现有关于内阁组建的研究多聚焦于短期战略博弈，部分学者强调应公平分配政府各部职位以降低内部冲突。本文基于16个前英属、法属非洲殖民地1960至2010年的内阁成员新数据，研究发现部分区域的政治代表规模系统性地远超其他区域。结合全新的历史与地理空间记录，本文进一步表明，这种区域政治不平等并非源于殖民时代的整体发展状况，而是尤其源自殖民时代的教育体系。本文认为，后殖民时代的内阁部长群体，在一定程度上是欧洲殖民行政人员基于识字水平开展的文官招录实践的副产品。区域政治不平等是殖民遗产影响当今非洲分配政治与发展失衡的一条尚未得到充分研究的路径。