This article aims to examine why ethnic allegiances have persisted as the most dominant platform used by the elites to organise collective action in Kenya. The author formulates a broad theoretical framework centred around the organisational role of ethnicity in negotiating social orders. Empirically, it is shown that ethnic allegiances in Kenya are deeply rooted in group inequalities and feelings of historical injustice. Moreover, the historical structure of the economy has skewed the distribution of economic rents toward group-specific activities and resources. Therefore, the early institutions of the country were designed in such a way that the stability of political order would depend on the elites’ ability to use ethnicity as a bargaining chip. Ethnicity continues to be politically salient partly because economic rents are not individualised enough to sustainably support trans-ethnic forms of organisation.
Little is known about the political consequences of immigration in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this paper, we estimate the effect of exposure to immigration on election outcomes in South Africa. Our analysis is based on municipality panel data and an instrumental variable (IV) strategy exploiting historical migrant settlement patterns. We find that local immigration concentration has a negative impact on the performance of the incumbent African National Congress, whereas support for the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, is found to increase in municipalities with a larger immigrant presence. These effects hold regardless of the skill levels of immigrants in a municipality. In terms of mechanisms, competition over jobs and local public services as well as ethnic diversity and cultural factors influence how immigration affects election outcomes. These findings are robust to a broad range of sensitivity checks. They provide evidence that immigration can be a politically salient issue in migrant-destination Sub-Saharan African countries. They also show that immigration can affect election results even in contexts where there is no single issue anti-migrant party.
The potential effects of migration on the welfare of the left behind consist in an important part of the debate around migration. In this paper, we use household survey data from Nigeria to examine the impact of family migration on educational attainment. Because migration status of households is endogenous, we use proportion of migrants in a local district and historical exposure to foreigners as proxied by distance to foreign missionary station in 1921 as instruments for migration of household member. We find that being in a migrant household increases the probability of completing secondary school and attending some postsecondary education. We also find that belonging to a migrant household increases the probability of own future migration. We further explore channels through which migration of family member affects education. We provide tentative evidence suggesting that anticipation of future own migration may be behind increased educational attainment.
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