Recent work highlights the importance of pre-modern political practices for explaining persistent institutional features, including representative democracy. Typically, this argument is institutional in nature—pre-industrial practices are hypothesized to either bolster or retard the transmission of democratic institutions. This article proposes a separate channel through which legacies of early statehood continue to impact the prospects of democratic governance. Using survey data from Africa, we document a positive relationship between early statehood development and support for autocratic rule among ordinary Africans. This finding is robust to a wide range of pre- and post-treatment covariates, country and survey round fixed effects, as well as an instrumental-variable design. The identified relationship is particularly prominent in respondents from precolonially centralized ethnic groups in former British colonies, suggesting the importance of locally surviving traditional institutions for propagation of norms that owe their origins to precolonial autocratic socialization.

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While much has been written about the resurgence of traditional authorities in sub-Saharan Africa, we know less about what explains differences in the institutional and regulatory frameworks that link traditional leaders to formal governments. Even though they have rarely been applied to resurging traditional leaders, existing theories of institutional choice are likely to yield important insights when applied to different models of mixed governance. In this article, the author closely examines the origins of the institutional framework that presently governs the relations between the central government and traditional authorities in Namibia. The author finds that both exogenous motivations such as the ideology of policymakers and endogenous determinants such as the potential for electoral mobilization matter for understanding the forms that mixed governance takes.

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