Current political order in Africa is often linked to legacies of colonialism, in particular to legacies of indirect colonial rule. However, evidence about the application of indirect rule is scarce. In this paper I argue that empire-level characteristics interacted with precolonial institutions in shaping the indirectness of local rule. First, British governments ruled more indirectly than French administrations, which followed a comparatively centralized administrative blueprint, came with a transformative republican ideology, and had more administrative resources. Empirically, I find that French colonization led to the demise of the lines of succession of seven out of ten precolonial polities, twice as many as under British rule. Second, precolonial centralization was a crucial prerequisite for indirect rule. Local administrative data from eight British colonies show that British colonizers employed less administrative effort and devolved more power to native authorities where centralized institutions existed. Such a pattern did not exist in French colonies. Together, these findings improve our understanding of the long-term effects of precolonial institutions and draw attention to the interaction of characteristics of dominant and subordinate units in shaping local governance arrangements.

Weak state capacity is one of the most important explanations of civil conflict. Yet, current conceptualizations of state capacity typically focus only on the state while ignoring the relational nature of armed conflict. We argue that opportunities for conflict arise where relational state capacity is low, that is, where the state has less control over its subjects than its potential challengers. This occurs in ethnic groups that are poorly accessible from the state capital, but are internally highly interconnected. To test this argument, we digitize detailed African road maps and convert them into a road atlas akin to Google Maps. We measure the accessibility and internal connectedness of groups via travel times obtained from this atlas and simulate road networks for an instrumental variable design. Our findings suggest that low relational state capacity increases the risk of armed conflict in Africa.

Social scientists in general and conflict researchers in particular increasingly combine multiple datasets to study ethnic politics and conflict in Africa. We facilitate these efforts by systematically linking over 8,100 ethnic categories from 11 databases, including surveys, geographic data, and expert-coded lists. Exploiting the linguistic tree from the Ethnologue database, we propose a systematic solution to the grouping problem of ethnicity. An analysis of political exclusion, mistrust of state leaders, and ethnic grievances highlights different ways of linking ethnic categories from multiple datasets. The LEDA open-source software package allows researchers to link ethnic groups from any database with explicit rules and to add their own data on ethnic groups.

Research on ethnic politics and political violence has benefited substantially from the growing availability of cross-national, geo-coded data on ethnic settlement patterns. However, because existing datasets represent ethnic homelands using aggregate polygon features, they lack information on ethnic compositions at the local level. Addressing this gap, this article introduces the Spatially Interpolated Data on Ethnicity (SIDE) dataset, a collection of 253 near-continuous maps of local ethno-linguistic, religious and ethno-religious settlement patterns in 47 low- and middle-income countries. We create these data using spatial interpolation and machine learning methods to generalize the ethnicity-related information in the geo-coded Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). For each DHS survey we provide the ethnic, religious and ethno-religious compositions of cells on a raster that covers the respective countries at a resolution of 30 arc-seconds. The resulting data are optimized for use with geographic information systems (GIS) software. Comparisons of SIDE with existing categorical datasets and district-level census data from Uganda and Senegal are used to assess the data’s accuracy. Finally, we use the new data to study the effects of local polarization between politically relevant ethnic groups, finding a positive effect on the risk of local violence such as riots and protests. However, local ethno-political polarization is not statistically associated with violent events pertaining to larger-scale processes such as civil wars.

Empirical studies show that many governments gear the provision of goods and services towards their ethnic peers. This article investigates governments’ strategies to provide ethnic favors in Africa. Recent studies of ethnic favoritism find that presidents' ethnic peers and home regions enjoy advantages, yet cannot disentangle whether goods are provided to entire regions or co-ethnic individuals. This article argues that local ethnic demography determines whether governments provide non-excludable public goods or more narrowly targeted handouts. Where government co-ethnics are in the majority, public goods benefit all locals regardless of their ethnic identity. Outside of these strongholds, incumbents pursue discriminatory strategies and only their co-ethnics gain from favoritism. Using fine-grained geographic data on ethnic demographics, the study finds support for the argument's implications in the local incidence of infant mortality. These findings have important implications for theories of distributive politics and conflict in multi-ethnic societies.