Ethnic favoritism: An axiom of politics?

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. We investigate the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism, i.e., preferential public policies targeted at the political leader's ethnic group. We construct a panel dataset of 2,022 ethnographic regions from 139 countries with annual observations from 1992 to 2012, and use nighttime light intensity as output measure to capture the distributive effects of a wide range of policies. We find robust evidence for ethnic favoritism: the political leaders' ethnographic regions enjoy 10% higher nighttime light intensity. We further find that ethnic favoritism is a global rather than Sub-Saharan African phenomenon, which is present in poor as well as rich countries; that political institutions have a weak effect on ethnic favoritism; that ethnic favoritism is most prevalent in ethnically fractionalized and segregated countries with long established polities; and that ethnic favoritism does not contribute to sustainable development. Terms of use: Documents inJEL-Code: D720, R110, J150, O430.

Ethnic Favoritism in Education in Kenya

“…The results are presented in Table 9. In contrast to Burgess et al (2015), who find that presidential ethnic favoritism in the allocation of roads in Kenya is strongly affected by regime type, but in keeping with the cross-national findings of Franck andRainer (2012) andDe Luca et al (2015), we find no such evidence with respect to primary schooling and a weakly negative effect on secondary schooling -note the coefficient estimates on the interaction terms in columns 1 and 3. Where we do find (somewhat weak) evidence for a regime effect is with respect to the impact of having a coethnic minister of education, which is associated with a modest increase in the number of years of secondary schooling in a democratic setting (see column 4).…”

“…2 These main findings are also in keeping with the results of cross-national studies of ethnic or regional favoritism by political leaders, such as Franck and Rainer (2012), Raschky (2014), andDe Luca et al (2015).…”

“…In contrast to that study, but in keeping with the cross-national result reported in Franck and Rainer (2012) and De Luca et al (2015), we find no evidence that patterns of favoritism by the president to his ethnic group were altered by the shift from single-party to multiparty politics.…”

Nighttime lights as a proxy for human development at the local level

“…Thereby, nighttime lights have helped to improve our understanding of comparative development [13, 14, 17, 18] as well as a host of other topics ranging from favoritism [9, 16] to ethnic inequality [15] and micro-finance [11]. …”

Horizontal inequality as a dependent variable

“…In particular, there is substantial research into the impacts of targeted efforts, such as affirmative action policies, on inequality and disadvantaged populations (see, e.g., Brown et al 2012;Kalev et al 2006;Sautman 1998;Sowell 2005). Conversely, we can also include here policies of ethnic favouritism that engender greater inequality (De Luca et al 2018).…”