Spatial Inequalities in African Political Economy

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How do inequalities across subnational regions within African countries shape patterns of conflict, competition, and political mobilization? Is ethnic identity the only driver of political competition and division in African societies, as much journalistic work, and even much work in political science, would suggests? So far, these questions have been difficult to answer because scholars have lacked the kind of subnational, micro-level, and local institutional data that is needed to test hypotheses about the connection between regional and local socio-economic inequalities, on the one hand, and local, regional, and national patterns of political competition, on the other hand. The main objective of this project is to develop the theory and data needed to solve this analytic and policy problem. Based on our earlier research and the results of our LSE-funded pilot study, our objective is to show that there are economic, socio-economic and institutional drivers of regionalized competition that have been systematically overlooked in policy and social-scientific understandings of political competition and conflict in Africa. Our results should shift scholars' and policy-makers' attention away from simplistic analyses that overemphasize political identity (ethnicity) as a driver of politics, and toward factors amendable to policy and administrative reforms -- institutions and regional inequalities -- as drivers of competition and conflict. Lack of data and theory about the political effects of regional inequalities in sub-Saharan African countries persists in spite of the fact that many scholars recognize that African countries are characterized by extreme disparities across subnational regions (Brown and Langer 2009). This gap is costly for scholars, policy makers, and citizens alike: social scientists know that very high levels of spatial or "horizontal" inequality are correlated with socio-political ills that hit African countries hard. These include the underprovision of public goods, deep social cleavages, the prominence of political grievances around inequality and exclusion, and civil conflict (Stewart 2000). The PI and interdisciplinary research team are uniquely positioned to combine new data and analytic techniques with deep substantive expertise in the political economy of regional and territorial dynamics in African countries. We break new ground in the study of African politics by using spatial data to reveal the dynamics regionalism, uneven economic development, and territorial inequalities that drive political coalition-building, group mobilization, and partisan and factional rivalries over fundamental policy choices. There is no equivalent or precedent for this kind of work in the fields of social science that we represent: political science, geography, economic history, and development studies. We believe that our research will chart-out new research agendas for the study of African spatial inequalities across all these fields. Our research outputs -- approximately 6-8 open-access journal length articles in high-impact venues, publicly-available replication data sets for all our published work, open-access policy reports and LSE working papers, blog posts and podcasts, Year 3 conferences hosted by the LSE Africa Centre in London and the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi with presenters and discussants from the academic and policy communities, and a university press book by Boone (2 years after the end of the project) -- will open new scholarly frontiers in understanding of territorial dynamics underlying political coalitions and political competition in African countries.