Scholars have long identified political bias in the way African politicians distribute state resources. Much of this literature focuses on the role of group identities, mainly ethnicity, and partisanship. This article shifts the focus to local governments, which have become increasingly important players in basic social service provision, and argues that public goods allocation under democratic decentralization is intimately shaped by historical identities. Specifically, the author highlights the role of identities rooted in the precolonial past. To explain this, she articulates a theory of institutional congruence, arguing that greater spatial overlap between formal institutional space and informal social identities improves the ability of elites to overcome local coordination problems. Looking to the West African state of Senegal, the author deploys a nested analysis, drawing on interviews with rural Senegalese elites to understand how the precolonial past shapes local politics today via the social identities it left behind. She also tests the argument with a unique, geocoded data set of village-level public goods investments in the 2000s, finding that areas that were once home to precolonial states distribute goods more broadly across space. These patterns cannot be explained by ethnic or electoral dynamics. Two brief examples from on-the-line cases illuminate how the presence of precolonial identities facilitates local cooperation. The article thus calls into question the tendency to treat identities as static over time, highlighting the interactive relationship between institutions and identities while drawing attention to emerging subnational variation in local government performance following decentralization reforms across the developing world.

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A number of studies have found that British colonialism-specifically its policy of indirect rule-improved local economic development relative to the French policy of direct rule. There is less consensus, however, as to why indirect rule would produce better economic outcomes. This article proposes three mechanisms linking indirect rule to development: the devolution of power to local communities, the empowerment of traditional authorities, and the reification of ethnic identities. Using a geographic regression discontinuity research design on Cameroon's internal anglophone-francophone border, a legacy of the country's dual colonial heritage, the article finds the most evidence for the first mechanism, that citizens on the anglophone side of the border are more likely to act locally and, indeed, see their local institutions as more legitimate. In contrast, we find mixed evidence for the other two mechanisms regarding the power of chiefs and ethnic identities. 1Over the past fifteen years, a significant body of research in both economics and political science has begun to take a long-term focus on the political economy of development. Of particular note is a debate over the impact of colonialism on contemporary economic disparities.In this article, we focus on one such recent claim: states that were ruled under British indirect rule have better levels of economic development today than areas administered under direct rule, associated most strongly with the French, especially at the local level. 1 This claim has been supported by both cross-national and subnational studies, 2 but the emerging literature has less to say about the mechanisms of the finding; why these two forms of colonialism would leave distinct economic legacies. 3 Recent work linking settler colonialism to better economic outcomes has theorized mechanisms, arguing that institutional transfers, specifically property rights, generated greater economic gains, but this represents only a small minority of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. 4 However, we lack such precise mechanisms for why former non-settler British colonies would have higher rates of economic development relative to former French colonies. 5 In their widelycited study of Cameroon, Lee and Schultz (2012) conclude: "Though our ability to identify causal mechanisms is limited, the evidence suggests that communities on the British side benefited from a policy of indirect rule and lack of forced labor, which produced more vigorous 1 Iyer 2010; Bertocchi and Canova 2002. 2 With some exceptions (see Lange 2004). 3 Although this article discusses the relative advantage of British colonialism in relation to French colonialism in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, we would like to emphatically state that British and French colonial rule had undeniably negative economic, political, and social impacts across the continent. The intention of this article is not to imply that British colonialism was good for economic or political development on the continent. 4 E.g. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Rob...

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