Explaining ethno-regional favouritism in Sub-Saharan Africa
利用非洲晴雨表和人口健康调查数据，研究撒哈拉以南非洲总统对同族群体在公共和私人产品供给上的偏袒，发现偏袒仅惠及少数非同族聚居区的同族人，且对主观感知的影响强于客观结果，支持非物质的“心理收益”解释。
• We conduct the largest examination to date of ethnic favouritism in Africa across multiple outcomes and countries. • We confirm the existence of positive effects of co-ethnicity at the individual level on public and private goods provision. • These effects decline as the district-level proportion of co-ethnics increases, such that most co-ethnics do not benefit. • Presidential and ruling party approval ratings are higher for co-ethnics, with no decline in more co-ethnic areas. • Our evidence is consistent with existence of non-material “psychic goods” from having a co-ethnic president in power. A burgeoning literature on ethno-regional favouritism in Sub-Saharan Africa has found that Presidents favour their co-ethnic kin in the provision of public and private goods. However, this scholarship has largely remained empirically narrow in focus, inasmuch as it preponderantly examines only one outcome and/or country at a time and can be contrasted with a separate set of literature which finds a null or even negative relationship between co-ethnicity and goods provision. As such we conduct the largest examination to date of ethno-regional favouritism in Sub-Saharan Africa using data from the Afrobarometer and DHS across both public and private goods and at both the individual and district level. We confirm the positive effects of individual-level co-ethnicity on a variety of outcomes, but also find that these benefits only accrue to the few co-ethnics living in non-co-ethnic areas and decline as the district-level proportion of co-ethnics increases. The positive effects of individual-level co-ethnicity are weaker for objective outcomes like access to infrastructure, asset ownership and employment but are stronger for subjective measures such as self-assessed living conditions and the quality of government services. We also find that the positive effects of co-ethnicity do not decline with the proportion of local co-ethnics for subjective perceptions of presidential and ruling party performance. This relationship does not hold, however, for perceptions of other non-political institutions like the courts or police, or for local governments. These results are consistent with the argument that co-ethnics derive non-material “psychic goods” from having a co-ethnic in power, rather than the standard “quid-pro-quo” theory common in the literature, and thus complicate the idea that ethnic favouritism in the provision of public and private goods is widespread in contemporary Africa. We supplement our quantitative findings with anecdotal evidence from Nigeria which supports our argument.