Catherine Boone | Inform, based at the London School of Economics and Political Science (original) (raw)
Papers by Catherine Boone
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, Apr 26, 2019
Land-related disputes and land conflicts are sometimes politicized in elections in African countr... more Land-related disputes and land conflicts are sometimes politicized in elections in African countries, but this is usually not the case. Usually, land-related conflict is highly localized, managed at the micro-political level by neo-customary authorities, and not connected to electoral competition. Why do land conflicts sometimes become entangled in electoral politics, and sometimes “scale up” to become divisive issues in regional and national elections? A key determinant of why and how land disputes become politicized is the nature of the underlying land tenure regime, which varies across space (often by subnational district) within African countries. Under the neo-customary land tenure regimes that prevail in most regions of smallholder agriculture in most African countries, land disputes tend to be “bottled up” in neo-customary land-management processes at the local level. Under the statist land tenure regimes that exist in some districts of many African countries, government agents and officials are directly involved in land allocation and directly implicated in dispute resolution. Under “statist” land tenure institutions, the politicization of land conflict, especially around elections, becomes more likely. Land tenure institutions in African countries define landholders’ relations to each other, the state, and markets. Understanding these institutions, including how they come under pressure and change, goes far in explaining how and where land rights become politicized.
World Development, Aug 1, 2017
Can the political science literature on sons-of-the-soil (SoS) conflict and civil war explain pat... more Can the political science literature on sons-of-the-soil (SoS) conflict and civil war explain patterns of ethnic conflict over land in sub-Saharan Africa? Sons-of-the-soil terminology, developed with reference to conflicts in South Asia, has been used to describe some of Africa's most violent or enduring conflicts, including those in in eastern DRC, northern Uganda, the Casamance Region of Senegal, and southwestern Côte d'Ivoire. Is Africa becoming more like South Asia, where land scarcity has often fueled conflicts between indigenous land owners and in-migrants? This paper argues that political science theories that focus on rural migration and land scarcity alone to explain outbreaks of SoS conflict in Asia fall short in Africa because they are underdetermining. The paper proposes a model of structure and variation in land tenure institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, and argues that these factors are critical in explaining the presence of absence of SoS conflict over land. This conceptualization of the problem highlights the strong role of the state in structuring relations of land use and access, and suggests that the character of local statebacked land institutions goes far in accounting for the presence or absence, scale, location, and triggering of large-scale SoS land conflict in zones of smallholder agriculture. A meta-study of 24 subnational cases of land conflict (1990-2014), drawn from secondary and primary sources and field observations, generates case-based support for the argument. The study suggest that omission of land-tenure institution variables enfeebles earlier political science theory, and may inadvertently lead policy makers and practitioners to the erroneous conclusion that in rural Africa, primordial groups compete for land in an anarchic state of nature.
Social Science Research Network, Jul 21, 2009
Land issues are often not about land only. Rather, they invoke issues of property more broadly, i... more Land issues are often not about land only. Rather, they invoke issues of property more broadly, implicating social and political relationships in the widest sense. Struggles over property may therefore be as much about the scope and structure of authority as about access to resources, with land claims being tightly wrapped in questions of authority, citizenship, and the politics of jurisdiction. This dynamic relationship between property and citizenship rights, on the one hand, and the authority to define and adjudicate these questions are –we believe – central to state formation (Boone 2003a, 2007; Lund 2008).1 In a recent issue of this journal, land markets in Africa receive special attention. The editors, Colin and Woodhouse (2010), give special emphasis to the multiple processes of commoditization of land and how they are embedded in different social relations. That particular issue focuses on how a great variety of transactions and market dynamics generate commodity characteris...
Professor Catherine Boone’s book, Property and Political Order in Africa (Cambridge, 2014), has b... more Professor Catherine Boone’s book, Property and Political Order in Africa (Cambridge, 2014), has been announced as co-winner of the Luebbert Best Book Award from the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). It has also won Best Book from the APSA-ASA African Politics Conference Group, and Honorable Mention for the African Studies Association’s Herskovitz Best Book Award. Below is the award citation.
LSE Research Online Documents on Economics, 2019
There is growing recognition in the economics literature that African countries are characterized... more There is growing recognition in the economics literature that African countries are characterized by very large economic disparities across subnational regions. Yet the lack of systematic and reliable empirical data at subnational levels of aggregation has made it difficult to explore possible links between these spatial inequalities and political dynamics. This paper reviews some of the empirical literature that attempts to measure and compare spatial inequality within and acorss African countries, and asks whether and how it might be used to bring studies of Africa into dialogue with comparative political economy work on regional inequality in other parts of the world.
Kenya's new constitution, inaugurated in August 2010, altered the institutional structure of ... more Kenya's new constitution, inaugurated in August 2010, altered the institutional structure of the state in complex ways. The general motivation behind reform was to enhance the political representation of ordinary citizens in general and that of marginalized ethno-regional groups in particular, and to devolve control over resources to the county level. In the land domain, reform objectives were as explicit and hard-hitting as they were anywhere else. Reform of land law and land administration explicitly aimed at putting an end to the bad old days of overcentralization of power in the hands of an executive branch considered by many to be corrupt, manipulative, and self-serving. Kenya's 2010 Constitution and the 2012 Land Acts produced three types of institutional restructuring that were designed to touch directly on land rights and land administration: devolution to 47 new county governments would be more accountable and responsive to local interests, and directly responsible ...
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2019
Land-related disputes and land conflicts are sometimes politicized in elections in African countr... more Land-related disputes and land conflicts are sometimes politicized in elections in African countries, but this is usually not the case. Usually, land-related conflict is highly localized, managed at the micro-political level by neo-customary authorities, and not connected to electoral competition. Why do land conflicts sometimes become entangled in electoral politics, and sometimes “scale up” to become divisive issues in regional and national elections? A key determinant of why and how land disputes become politicized is the nature of the underlying land tenure regime, which varies across space (often by subnational district) within African countries. Under the neo-customary land tenure regimes that prevail in most regions of smallholder agriculture in most African countries, land disputes tend to be “bottled up” in neo-customary land-management processes at the local level. Under the statist land tenure regimes that exist in some districts of many African countries, government agen...
Political Geography, 2021
Smallholder settlement schemes have played a prominent role in Kenya's contested history of state... more Smallholder settlement schemes have played a prominent role in Kenya's contested history of state-building, land politics, and electoral mobilization. This paper presents the first georeferenced dataset documenting scheme location, boundaries, and attributes of Kenya's 533 official settlement schemes, as well as the first systematic data on scheme creation since 1980. The data show that almost half of all government schemes were created after 1980, as official rural development rationales for state-sponsored settlement gave way to more explicitly welfarist and electoralist objectives. Even so, logics of state territorialization to fix ethnicized, partisan constituencies to statedefined territorial units pervade the history of scheme creation over the entire 1962-2016 period, as theorized in classic political geography works on state territorialization. While these "geopolitics" of regime construction are fueled by patronage politics, they also sustain practices of land allocation that affirm the moral and political legitimacy of grievance-backed claims for land. This fuels ongoing contestation around political representation and acute, if socially-fragmented, demands for state-recognition of land rights. Our findings are consistent with recent political geography and interdisciplinary work on rural peoples' demands for state recognition of land rights and access to natural resources. Kenya's history of settlement scheme creation shows that even in the country's core agricultural districts, where the reach of formal state authority is undisputed, the territorial politics of powerconsolidation and resource allocation continues to be shaped by social demands and pressures from below.
The Journal of Modern African Studies, 2018
Land law reform through registration and titling is often viewed as a technocratic, good-governan... more Land law reform through registration and titling is often viewed as a technocratic, good-governance step toward building market economies and depoliticising land transactions. In actual practice, however, land registration and titling programmes can be highly partisan, bitterly contentious, and carried forward by political logics that diverge strongly from the market-enhancing vision. This paper uses evidence from Côte d'Ivoire to support and develop this claim. In Côte d'Ivoire after 1990, multiple, opposing political logics drove land law reform as it was pursued by successive governments representing rival coalitions of the national electorate. Between the mid-1990s and 2016, different logics – alternatively privileging user rights, the ethnic land rights of autochthones, and finally a state-building logic – prevailed in succession as national government crafted and then sought to implement the new 1998 land law. The case underscores the extent to which deeply political q...
The Journal of Development Studies, 2018
Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more 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. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
World Development, 2017
Can the political science literature on sons-of-the-soil (SoS) conflict and civil war explain pat... more Can the political science literature on sons-of-the-soil (SoS) conflict and civil war explain patterns of ethnic conflict over land in sub-Saharan Africa? Sons-of-the-soil terminology, developed with reference to conflicts in South Asia, has been used to describe some of Africa's most violent or enduring conflicts, including those in in eastern DRC, northern Uganda, the Casamance Region of Senegal, and southwestern Côte d'Ivoire. Is Africa becoming more like South Asia, where land scarcity has often fueled conflicts between indigenous land owners and in-migrants? This paper argues that political science theories that focus on rural migration and land scarcity alone to explain outbreaks of SoS conflict in Asia fall short in Africa because they are underdetermining. The paper proposes a model of structure and variation in land tenure institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, and argues that these factors are critical in explaining the presence of absence of SoS conflict over land. This conceptualization of the problem highlights the strong role of the state in structuring relations of land use and access, and suggests that the character of local statebacked land institutions goes far in accounting for the presence or absence, scale, location, and triggering of large-scale SoS land conflict in zones of smallholder agriculture. A meta-study of 24 subnational cases of land conflict (1990-2014), drawn from secondary and primary sources and field observations, generates case-based support for the argument. The study suggest that omission of land-tenure institution variables enfeebles earlier political science theory, and may inadvertently lead policy makers and practitioners to the erroneous conclusion that in rural Africa, primordial groups compete for land in an anarchic state of nature.
Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2015
Land tenure regimes and state structure in rural Africa: implications for the forms of resistance... more Land tenure regimes and state structure in rural Africa: implications for the forms of resistance to large-scale land acquisitions by outsiders. Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 33 (2). pp. 171-190.
The Journal of Modern African Studies, 2021
Since 2000, many African countries have adopted land tenure reforms that aim at comprehensive lan... more Since 2000, many African countries have adopted land tenure reforms that aim at comprehensive land registration (or certification) and titling. Much work in political science and in the advocacy literature identifies recipients of land certificates or titles as ‘programme beneficiaries’, and political scientists have modelled titling programmes as a form of distributive politics. In practice, however, rural land registration programmes are often divisive and difficult to implement. This paper tackles the apparent puzzle of friction around rural land certification. We study Côte d'Ivoire's rocky history of land certification from 2004 to 2017 to identify political economy variables that may give rise to heterogeneous and even conflicting preferences around certification. Regional inequalities, social inequalities, and regional variation in pre-existing land tenure institutions are factors that help account for friction or even resistance around land titling, and thus the diff...
Although electoral malapportionment is a recurrent theme in monitoring reports on African electio... more Although electoral malapportionment is a recurrent theme in monitoring reports on African elections, few researchers have tackled this issue. Here we theorize the meaning and broader implications of malapportionment in eight African countries with Single Member District (SMD) electoral systems. Using a new dataset on registered voters and constituency level election results, we study malapportionment's magnitude, persistence over time, and electoral consequences. The analysis reveals that patterns of apportionment institutionalized in the pre-1990 era established a long-lasting bias in favor of rural voters. This " rural bias " has been strikingly stable in the post-1990 era, even where the ancien regime has been voted out of power. These findings underscore the importance of the urban-rural distinction in explaining electoral outcomes in Africa.
Land Rights and the Structure of Politics, 2000
Land Rights and the Structure of Politics, 2000
Land Rights and the Structure of Politics, 2000
Large literatures in political theory and political economy argue that private property regimes h... more Large literatures in political theory and political economy argue that private property regimes help support liberal electoral regimes by constraining majoritarian politics, lowering the stakes of elections, and protecting "fundamental" or minority rights. This article probes implications of this argument for elections in sub-Saharan Africa, a mostly rural continent where only about 2% to 10% of all rural property (by country) is held under private title. Do Africa's rural property regimes shape electoral dynamics and, if so, which ones, and how? This article examines the case of Kenya, focusing on 1991-1992 electoral dynamics in rural zones in which the state itself has exercised direct prerogative over land allocation. We show that in these zones, politicians manipulated land rights to mobilize supporters and punish opponents. They did so in ways that contributed directly to widespread land-related violence at election time. References to other African cases help generalize and set scope conditions on the argument.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, Apr 26, 2019
Land-related disputes and land conflicts are sometimes politicized in elections in African countr... more Land-related disputes and land conflicts are sometimes politicized in elections in African countries, but this is usually not the case. Usually, land-related conflict is highly localized, managed at the micro-political level by neo-customary authorities, and not connected to electoral competition. Why do land conflicts sometimes become entangled in electoral politics, and sometimes “scale up” to become divisive issues in regional and national elections? A key determinant of why and how land disputes become politicized is the nature of the underlying land tenure regime, which varies across space (often by subnational district) within African countries. Under the neo-customary land tenure regimes that prevail in most regions of smallholder agriculture in most African countries, land disputes tend to be “bottled up” in neo-customary land-management processes at the local level. Under the statist land tenure regimes that exist in some districts of many African countries, government agents and officials are directly involved in land allocation and directly implicated in dispute resolution. Under “statist” land tenure institutions, the politicization of land conflict, especially around elections, becomes more likely. Land tenure institutions in African countries define landholders’ relations to each other, the state, and markets. Understanding these institutions, including how they come under pressure and change, goes far in explaining how and where land rights become politicized.
World Development, Aug 1, 2017
Can the political science literature on sons-of-the-soil (SoS) conflict and civil war explain pat... more Can the political science literature on sons-of-the-soil (SoS) conflict and civil war explain patterns of ethnic conflict over land in sub-Saharan Africa? Sons-of-the-soil terminology, developed with reference to conflicts in South Asia, has been used to describe some of Africa's most violent or enduring conflicts, including those in in eastern DRC, northern Uganda, the Casamance Region of Senegal, and southwestern Côte d'Ivoire. Is Africa becoming more like South Asia, where land scarcity has often fueled conflicts between indigenous land owners and in-migrants? This paper argues that political science theories that focus on rural migration and land scarcity alone to explain outbreaks of SoS conflict in Asia fall short in Africa because they are underdetermining. The paper proposes a model of structure and variation in land tenure institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, and argues that these factors are critical in explaining the presence of absence of SoS conflict over land. This conceptualization of the problem highlights the strong role of the state in structuring relations of land use and access, and suggests that the character of local statebacked land institutions goes far in accounting for the presence or absence, scale, location, and triggering of large-scale SoS land conflict in zones of smallholder agriculture. A meta-study of 24 subnational cases of land conflict (1990-2014), drawn from secondary and primary sources and field observations, generates case-based support for the argument. The study suggest that omission of land-tenure institution variables enfeebles earlier political science theory, and may inadvertently lead policy makers and practitioners to the erroneous conclusion that in rural Africa, primordial groups compete for land in an anarchic state of nature.
Social Science Research Network, Jul 21, 2009
Land issues are often not about land only. Rather, they invoke issues of property more broadly, i... more Land issues are often not about land only. Rather, they invoke issues of property more broadly, implicating social and political relationships in the widest sense. Struggles over property may therefore be as much about the scope and structure of authority as about access to resources, with land claims being tightly wrapped in questions of authority, citizenship, and the politics of jurisdiction. This dynamic relationship between property and citizenship rights, on the one hand, and the authority to define and adjudicate these questions are –we believe – central to state formation (Boone 2003a, 2007; Lund 2008).1 In a recent issue of this journal, land markets in Africa receive special attention. The editors, Colin and Woodhouse (2010), give special emphasis to the multiple processes of commoditization of land and how they are embedded in different social relations. That particular issue focuses on how a great variety of transactions and market dynamics generate commodity characteris...
Professor Catherine Boone’s book, Property and Political Order in Africa (Cambridge, 2014), has b... more Professor Catherine Boone’s book, Property and Political Order in Africa (Cambridge, 2014), has been announced as co-winner of the Luebbert Best Book Award from the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). It has also won Best Book from the APSA-ASA African Politics Conference Group, and Honorable Mention for the African Studies Association’s Herskovitz Best Book Award. Below is the award citation.
LSE Research Online Documents on Economics, 2019
There is growing recognition in the economics literature that African countries are characterized... more There is growing recognition in the economics literature that African countries are characterized by very large economic disparities across subnational regions. Yet the lack of systematic and reliable empirical data at subnational levels of aggregation has made it difficult to explore possible links between these spatial inequalities and political dynamics. This paper reviews some of the empirical literature that attempts to measure and compare spatial inequality within and acorss African countries, and asks whether and how it might be used to bring studies of Africa into dialogue with comparative political economy work on regional inequality in other parts of the world.
Kenya's new constitution, inaugurated in August 2010, altered the institutional structure of ... more Kenya's new constitution, inaugurated in August 2010, altered the institutional structure of the state in complex ways. The general motivation behind reform was to enhance the political representation of ordinary citizens in general and that of marginalized ethno-regional groups in particular, and to devolve control over resources to the county level. In the land domain, reform objectives were as explicit and hard-hitting as they were anywhere else. Reform of land law and land administration explicitly aimed at putting an end to the bad old days of overcentralization of power in the hands of an executive branch considered by many to be corrupt, manipulative, and self-serving. Kenya's 2010 Constitution and the 2012 Land Acts produced three types of institutional restructuring that were designed to touch directly on land rights and land administration: devolution to 47 new county governments would be more accountable and responsive to local interests, and directly responsible ...
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2019
Land-related disputes and land conflicts are sometimes politicized in elections in African countr... more Land-related disputes and land conflicts are sometimes politicized in elections in African countries, but this is usually not the case. Usually, land-related conflict is highly localized, managed at the micro-political level by neo-customary authorities, and not connected to electoral competition. Why do land conflicts sometimes become entangled in electoral politics, and sometimes “scale up” to become divisive issues in regional and national elections? A key determinant of why and how land disputes become politicized is the nature of the underlying land tenure regime, which varies across space (often by subnational district) within African countries. Under the neo-customary land tenure regimes that prevail in most regions of smallholder agriculture in most African countries, land disputes tend to be “bottled up” in neo-customary land-management processes at the local level. Under the statist land tenure regimes that exist in some districts of many African countries, government agen...
Political Geography, 2021
Smallholder settlement schemes have played a prominent role in Kenya's contested history of state... more Smallholder settlement schemes have played a prominent role in Kenya's contested history of state-building, land politics, and electoral mobilization. This paper presents the first georeferenced dataset documenting scheme location, boundaries, and attributes of Kenya's 533 official settlement schemes, as well as the first systematic data on scheme creation since 1980. The data show that almost half of all government schemes were created after 1980, as official rural development rationales for state-sponsored settlement gave way to more explicitly welfarist and electoralist objectives. Even so, logics of state territorialization to fix ethnicized, partisan constituencies to statedefined territorial units pervade the history of scheme creation over the entire 1962-2016 period, as theorized in classic political geography works on state territorialization. While these "geopolitics" of regime construction are fueled by patronage politics, they also sustain practices of land allocation that affirm the moral and political legitimacy of grievance-backed claims for land. This fuels ongoing contestation around political representation and acute, if socially-fragmented, demands for state-recognition of land rights. Our findings are consistent with recent political geography and interdisciplinary work on rural peoples' demands for state recognition of land rights and access to natural resources. Kenya's history of settlement scheme creation shows that even in the country's core agricultural districts, where the reach of formal state authority is undisputed, the territorial politics of powerconsolidation and resource allocation continues to be shaped by social demands and pressures from below.
The Journal of Modern African Studies, 2018
Land law reform through registration and titling is often viewed as a technocratic, good-governan... more Land law reform through registration and titling is often viewed as a technocratic, good-governance step toward building market economies and depoliticising land transactions. In actual practice, however, land registration and titling programmes can be highly partisan, bitterly contentious, and carried forward by political logics that diverge strongly from the market-enhancing vision. This paper uses evidence from Côte d'Ivoire to support and develop this claim. In Côte d'Ivoire after 1990, multiple, opposing political logics drove land law reform as it was pursued by successive governments representing rival coalitions of the national electorate. Between the mid-1990s and 2016, different logics – alternatively privileging user rights, the ethnic land rights of autochthones, and finally a state-building logic – prevailed in succession as national government crafted and then sought to implement the new 1998 land law. The case underscores the extent to which deeply political q...
The Journal of Development Studies, 2018
Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more 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. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
World Development, 2017
Can the political science literature on sons-of-the-soil (SoS) conflict and civil war explain pat... more Can the political science literature on sons-of-the-soil (SoS) conflict and civil war explain patterns of ethnic conflict over land in sub-Saharan Africa? Sons-of-the-soil terminology, developed with reference to conflicts in South Asia, has been used to describe some of Africa's most violent or enduring conflicts, including those in in eastern DRC, northern Uganda, the Casamance Region of Senegal, and southwestern Côte d'Ivoire. Is Africa becoming more like South Asia, where land scarcity has often fueled conflicts between indigenous land owners and in-migrants? This paper argues that political science theories that focus on rural migration and land scarcity alone to explain outbreaks of SoS conflict in Asia fall short in Africa because they are underdetermining. The paper proposes a model of structure and variation in land tenure institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, and argues that these factors are critical in explaining the presence of absence of SoS conflict over land. This conceptualization of the problem highlights the strong role of the state in structuring relations of land use and access, and suggests that the character of local statebacked land institutions goes far in accounting for the presence or absence, scale, location, and triggering of large-scale SoS land conflict in zones of smallholder agriculture. A meta-study of 24 subnational cases of land conflict (1990-2014), drawn from secondary and primary sources and field observations, generates case-based support for the argument. The study suggest that omission of land-tenure institution variables enfeebles earlier political science theory, and may inadvertently lead policy makers and practitioners to the erroneous conclusion that in rural Africa, primordial groups compete for land in an anarchic state of nature.
Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2015
Land tenure regimes and state structure in rural Africa: implications for the forms of resistance... more Land tenure regimes and state structure in rural Africa: implications for the forms of resistance to large-scale land acquisitions by outsiders. Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 33 (2). pp. 171-190.
The Journal of Modern African Studies, 2021
Since 2000, many African countries have adopted land tenure reforms that aim at comprehensive lan... more Since 2000, many African countries have adopted land tenure reforms that aim at comprehensive land registration (or certification) and titling. Much work in political science and in the advocacy literature identifies recipients of land certificates or titles as ‘programme beneficiaries’, and political scientists have modelled titling programmes as a form of distributive politics. In practice, however, rural land registration programmes are often divisive and difficult to implement. This paper tackles the apparent puzzle of friction around rural land certification. We study Côte d'Ivoire's rocky history of land certification from 2004 to 2017 to identify political economy variables that may give rise to heterogeneous and even conflicting preferences around certification. Regional inequalities, social inequalities, and regional variation in pre-existing land tenure institutions are factors that help account for friction or even resistance around land titling, and thus the diff...
Although electoral malapportionment is a recurrent theme in monitoring reports on African electio... more Although electoral malapportionment is a recurrent theme in monitoring reports on African elections, few researchers have tackled this issue. Here we theorize the meaning and broader implications of malapportionment in eight African countries with Single Member District (SMD) electoral systems. Using a new dataset on registered voters and constituency level election results, we study malapportionment's magnitude, persistence over time, and electoral consequences. The analysis reveals that patterns of apportionment institutionalized in the pre-1990 era established a long-lasting bias in favor of rural voters. This " rural bias " has been strikingly stable in the post-1990 era, even where the ancien regime has been voted out of power. These findings underscore the importance of the urban-rural distinction in explaining electoral outcomes in Africa.
Land Rights and the Structure of Politics, 2000
Land Rights and the Structure of Politics, 2000
Land Rights and the Structure of Politics, 2000
Large literatures in political theory and political economy argue that private property regimes h... more Large literatures in political theory and political economy argue that private property regimes help support liberal electoral regimes by constraining majoritarian politics, lowering the stakes of elections, and protecting "fundamental" or minority rights. This article probes implications of this argument for elections in sub-Saharan Africa, a mostly rural continent where only about 2% to 10% of all rural property (by country) is held under private title. Do Africa's rural property regimes shape electoral dynamics and, if so, which ones, and how? This article examines the case of Kenya, focusing on 1991-1992 electoral dynamics in rural zones in which the state itself has exercised direct prerogative over land allocation. We show that in these zones, politicians manipulated land rights to mobilize supporters and punish opponents. They did so in ways that contributed directly to widespread land-related violence at election time. References to other African cases help generalize and set scope conditions on the argument.