Chiefly Patronage and Schooling

Abstract

In developing countries, indigenous chiefly systems can be a main driver of patronage, potentially hampering development. This paper explores how chiefly patronage shapes people’s incentives for schooling in Fiji. I develop a model to show how chiefly status can influence a household's child schooling decision, depending on whether the patronage operates in labor markets. I employ a triple-difference approach by combining the novel direct measures of chieftaincy from my original survey data with 1970 independence and 1987 coups as natural experiments, and gender. I show that indigenous chieftaincy interacted with British colonial rule to affect employment, and thus schooling, after independence for males but not females in chiefly networks. After this patronage weakened under post-coup reforms, males in the networks temporarily increased secondary schooling to compensate for their weakened advantage. The majority of male Fijians outside the networks were less encouraged to make schooling investments over time. As such, chiefly patronage persistently distorted male secondary schooling, thereby augmenting the outperformance of female education.

Keywords:

• Chiefly patronage
• employment
• schooling
• Fiji

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my field team––Jonati Torocake, Viliame Manavure, Viliame Lomaloma, and 16 enumerators––for their advice, enthusiasm, and exceptional efforts on behalf of this project. Special thanks are owed to the Fijians of the region who so willingly participated in the survey. The Cakaudrove Provincial Office in Fiji offered valuable institutional support. This paper has benefited significantly from the comments and suggestions of Yutaka Arimoto, Katsuo Kogure, Takashi Kurosaki, Chiaki Moriguchi, Chris Udry, and seminar participants at Hitotsubashi University on an early version of this work.

Ethical approval

Data analysis received IRB approval from the University of Tokyo (19-357). Verbal informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 Patronage can lower organizational performance if favoritism disincentivizes subordinates (Aghion & Tirole, 1997; Prendergast & Topel, 1996).

2 As was common in Fiji when I conducted my survey in 2005, in this paper, ‘Fijians’ means native Fijians (iTaukei) and ‘Indians’ means Indo-Fijians.

3 While some authors use the terms ‘patronage’ and ‘clientelism’ interchangeably (e.g. Kitschelt & Wilkinson, 2007), others ‘define patronage narrowly as the exchange of public sector jobs for political support, … whereas clientelism includes not only jobs but also other state resources (goods, services, decisions, etc.)’ (Hicken, 2011, p. 295).

4 Recent empirical works study ethnic favoritism in the provision of public goods in Africa (Burgess, Jedwab, Miguel, Morjaria, & Padró I Miquel, 2015; Franck & Rainer, 2012; Kramon & Posner, 2016; Marx, Stoker, & Suri, 2019).

5 In about one-third of developing countries (45), girls outnumbered boys in secondary education in 2008. The literature highlights improved returns to education for females and reduced cost of schooling fueled by government policies, such as school construction, free primary education, cash transfers, and so forth (World Bank, 2011).

6 Among out-migrants from Fiji in the 1987–2001 period, about 89 per cent were Indians, 6.5 per cent were Fijians, and the remaining were of other races (Reddy et al., 2004).

7 There are also non-chief leaders, and the village chief role can be served by chiefs, subchiefs, or non-chief leaders. Chiefs are ranked higher than subchiefs, who are ranked higher than non-chief leaders (Takasaki, 2011).

8 The Ministry of Fijian Affairs (established in 1967 and renamed the Ministry of iTaukei Affairs in 2013) was responsible for preserving Fijian culture and advancing rural development for Fijians. The minister presided over the Great Council of Chiefs until 1999, and this position was often simultaneously held by the prime minister. The Great Council of Chiefs was disestablished in 2012.

9 I focus on the chiefly status of mataqali. Many villages have only one yavusa (i.e. yavusa defines the village), and the tokatoka to which the vanua chief belongs is too uncommon to be statistically analyzed.

10 Cakaudrove Province is located mostly on eastern Vanua Levu Island and the whole of Taveuni Island, the second- and third-largest islands in the country, respectively. They lag significantly behind the largest island, Viti Levu, where the state capital, two international airports, and most tourism businesses are situated. Distinct from the two other provinces (Bua and Macuata) on Vanua Levu Island, Cakaudrove is not in a sugar cane area; as a result, the Indian population is relatively small and their presence is limited to towns. In the 2007 census, the population shares of Fijians, Indians, and other races, respectively, were 72.9, 16.1, and 11.0 per cent in Cakaudrove, compared to 56.8, 37.5, and 5.7 per cent in the whole country (Fiji Islands Bureau of Statistics, 2008).

11 Among the 16 districts, two are headed by the same vanua chief and another two are headed by another same vanua chief; thus, there are 14 chiefly villages. One chiefly village was not sampled because of a political concern. In two districts, only one village was sampled: a chiefly village in one and a non-chiefly village in the other.

12 A small number of young adults who were in school at the time of the interviews are also excluded. In addition, two districts with only one village that lack intradistrict variations in chiefly-village status are excluded.

13 Although as a result of delayed schooling the 35–39 cohort could include a significant number of individuals who completed secondary education, if any, after the coup, the analysis below shows that adults in this cohort were not young enough to make adjustments in schooling to complete secondary education in response to the coup. The 2000 coup did not affect secondary schooling in the sample, because even those in the 20–24 cohort were not young enough to make adjustments.

14 Males were 37 years old and females were 35, on average. With respect to marital status, 63 per cent of males and 61 per cent of females were married; in contrast, 76 per cent of males and 93 per cent females not in their original clans were married.

15 A similar overtaking pattern is found in the 2004–2005 Annual Employment Survey in Fiji: female secondary education is lower than male secondary education among adults age 35 or older and the converse holds true at ages 23–34 (Narsey, 2007).

16 The model can be extended so that $\underset{\_}{w}$ is a function of schooling s. Since my empirical analysis focuses on impacts of social status, not education, on employment, not wage income, I consider the current model for simplicity and tractability.

17 For each cohort I run OLS using a dummy for chiefly-village status, a dummy for male, and their interaction term as three explanatory variables. The figure reports the estimated coefficients of the last term.

18 Education of adults’ parents cannot be used as a control, because it is also an outcome variable in their generation. None of the time-variant measures observed at the time of the interviews, such as wealth, can be used as proxies for historical determinants, because they are endogenous variables determined by education and income and thus chiefly status over time.

19 The results without non-parametric controls for cohort-varying and gender-specific district effects and gender-specific cohort effects in equation (1) are relatively similar for both employment and education, except for the 40–44 cohort for education as discussed below (Supplementary Table A2, columns 1 and 2).

20 Without non-parametric controls in equation (1), female employment in chiefly villages was more common in the two post-coup cohorts and the transitional 40–44 cohort than it was in non-chiefly villages (Supplementary Table A2, column 3), indicating a strong bias caused by uncontrolled district heterogeneity.

21 Without non-parametric controls in equation (1), regardless of gender, schooling in chiefly villages was more common in all three post-coup cohorts and the 40–44 cohort than it was in non-chiefly villages (Supplementary Table A2, column 4), indicating a strong bias caused by uncontrolled district heterogeneity.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been made possible through support provided by the Sumitomo Foundation (033253), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (16402012), and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology in Japan (17653026). Any errors of interpretation are solely the author’s responsibility.