• Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics

Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics

Paperback

Series: Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics

United States Politics

ISBN10: 1009286188
ISBN13: 9781009286183
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: Dec 22 2022
Pages: 318
Weight: 1.03
Height: 0.71 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? Looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa, this book advances a novel answer: communities are better able to coordinate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms. This book identifies the precolonial past as the driver of striking subnational variation in the present because these social institutions only encompass the many villages of the local state in areas that were once home to precolonial polities. The book develops and tests a theory of institutional congruence to document how the past shapes contemporary elite approaches to redistribution within the local state. Where precolonial kingdoms left behind collective identities and dense social networks, local elites find it easier to cooperate following decentralization. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Also in

United States Politics