This article presents the de jure political and economic institutional indicators for Kenya for the period 1884–2010, and discusses their evolution over time. The construction of these indicators is based on the leximetric framework proposed by Fedderke et al. (2001), which relies on the formal legislative history that governs immovable property, political rights, and civil liberties. In doing so, we are able to capture the notion of permanency that characterizes institutions according to Douglass North. We provide a narrative that demonstrates how existing political and economic rights in Kenya were largely shaped by the legal framework introduced by the British settlers since 1884. These laws were initially designed to create a settler economy in order to recoup the heavy investments cost of the Uganda railway. To this end, the colonial authorities promoted a liberal freehold property rights system for the benefit of the settlers while curtailing the indigenous populations’ basic civil liberties and customary rights to land. We correlate these newly constructed indexes with conventional institutional indicators for overlapping periods. Overall, we find high unconditional correlations, which suggests that our indicators may be fairly reliable even in the long run (126 years).
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