Leadership favouritism in Africa

Abstract

In this note, I document a strong and positive relationship between the ethnic affiliation of African leaders and satellite night-time luminosity in the historical homelands of ethnic groups. Using a unique data-set on 630 ethnicities and 86 leaders from 48 African countries, I show that luminosity is on average 75% relatively higher in leaders’ ethnic homelands.

Keywords:

• Africa
• local development
• institutions
• ethnic favouritism

JEL Classification:

• O11
• E02
• D73
• N17

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Kevin Grier, Robin Grier and Daniel Hicks for their suggestions and comments.

Notes

¹ In a recent contribution, Hodler and Raschky (2014) document a strong pattern of favouritism within the administrative boundaries of national leaders’ birthplaces using a large sample of institutionally heterogeneous countries. In this note, the analysis is restricted to the homelands of Africa’s ethnic groups, as documented in the ethnographic atlas of Murdock (1959). While these authors document that less than 4% variation in luminosity for the world as a whole is explained by the leader’s effect, the estimates I document for Africa are as high as 75%.

² DMSP/OLS is the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System.