The effects of economic and political reforms on patronage in Africa remains unclear. In particular, there is much disagreement about whether structural adjustment programs and democratization have helped to make patronage less pervasive in African politics. Here, I examine the case study of Uganda, which has received much praise for its large-scale economic and political reforms since the late 1980s. However, at the same time, Uganda has also experienced a near-explosion in the number of districts (the highest level of local government), going from 39 to 80 in less than a decade. I examine a variety of potential reasons why these districts might have been created and argue, through the use of both qualitative and quantitative analysis, that district creation has functioned as a source of patronage. Specifically, I show that President Museveni_s government has created new districts as a means to compensate for other patronage resources lost through reforms and that new districts have helped him to continue to win elections. This paper thus constitutes the first rigorous demonstration that the creation of new sub-national political units can constitute a form of patronage and suggests that similar processes may be currently taking place across Africa.

We would like to thank Jeffrey Conroy-Krutz for sharing data with us and Cecilia Lanata Briones for research assistance. We thank seminar participants at the

Abstract:An increasingly large literature on patronage and clientelism has developed within political science in recent years. Yet this body of scholarship has heretofore failed to develop theories that explain variation in patronage allocation across countries. Here I develop such a theory based on the logic of institutional choice, whereby political leaders allocate patronage in accordance with the political threats they face. Specifically, I argue that patronage allocation can be explained by varying political geographies and time horizons. I test this theory through a comparative case study of Rwanda and Uganda, whose current regimes are remarkably similar in origin and structure. I also extend my analysis to previous regimes in both countries, including the analysis of counterfactual or off-path behavior. In all cases I find strong support for the theory. Organisation pour la démocratie populaire -mouvement du travail (ODP-MT)(Organization for Popular Democracy -Labour Movement)Name of ruling party in Burkina Faso, 1989-1996 Office de distribution du pain; mange et tais-toi (Office for Bread Distribution -Eat and Shut Up) Popular wordplay on ODP-MT (Harsch, 1998, pp. 636-637)

Abstract:The costs and consequences of ethnic diversity in Africa have been widely noted. However, despite Africa's high level of ethnic diversity and its large internal variation, the sources of this diversity remain unexplained. Here we show that ethnic diversity in Africa is a result of its tropical location, the pre-colonial slave trade, the colonial creation of large states and low levels of urbanization. The effect of these variables are robust to various controls and specifications. We also show that, once pre-colonial slavery is introduced, an African dummy variable becomes insignificant in regressions containing a world-wide sample of countries.

Green, Elliott. (2012) On the Size and Shape of African States. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/j.1468‐2478.2012.00723.x 
© 2012 International Studies Association African states are both unusually large and well known for having artificial borders created during the colonial period. While African state size and shape have been previously shown to be correlated with negative development outcomes, no one has heretofore examined the origins of either phenomenon. Here, I show that African state size and shape are not arbitrary but are rather a consequence of Africa’s low pre‐colonial population density, whereby low‐density areas were consolidated into unusually large colonial states with artificial borders. I also show that state size has a strong negative relationship with pre‐colonial trade and that trade and population density alone explain the majority of the variation in African state size. Finally, I do not find a relationship between population density and state size or shape among non‐African former colonies, thereby emphasizing the distinctiveness of modern African state formation.