African Borders as Sources of Natural Experiments Promise and Pitfalls

McCauley, John F.; Posner, Daniel N.

doi:10.1017/psrm.2014.37

Cited by 79 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 33 publications

(33 reference statements)

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“…Colonial authorities drew these political borders in sub-Saharan Africa with little knowledge of or sensitivity to the distribution of cultural groups (McCauley & Posner, 2007;Posner, 2004b), so we can treat the "assignment" of coethnics as roughly orthogonal to cultural affinities. Within the sample of Afrobarometer respondents in the 2005-2006 wave, there are a handful of groups that happen also to span political borders: the Chewas in Zambia and Malawi, the Yorubas in Nigeria and Benin, and the Luos in Kenya and Uganda.…”

Section: Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

The Ethnicity–Policy Preference Link in Sub-Saharan Africa

Lieberman

McClendon

2012

Comparative Political Studies

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Scholars have begun to investigate the mechanisms that link ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision but have paid only minimal attention to the role of preferences for public policies. Some argue that ethnic groups hold culturally distinctive preferences for goods and policies, and that such differences impede effective policy making, but these studies provide little evidence to support this claim. Others argue that preferences do not vary systematically across ethnic groups, but again the evidence is limited. In this article, we engage in a systematic exploration of the link between ethnic identity and preferences for public policies through a series of individual and aggregated analyses of Afrobarometer survey data from 18 sub-Saharan African countries. We find that in most countries, preferences do vary based on ethnic group membership. This variation is not merely an expression of individual-level socioeconomic differences or of group-level cultural differences. Instead, we suggest that citizens use ethnicity as a group heuristic for evaluating public policies in a few predictable ways: We find more persistent disagreement about public policies between politically relevant ethnic groups and where group disparities in wealth are high.

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Section: Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

The Ethnicity–Policy Preference Link in Sub-Saharan Africa

Lieberman

McClendon

2012

Comparative Political Studies

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“…Such an approach has been used, for example, to measure the effect of institutions on economic development20 or to assess the role of policy measures on sociopolitical outcomes21. The use of jurisdictional borders to infer the causal effect of policies is not without criticism22. In our setting, lack of comparability of the two sides of the border due to differences in terrain may invalidate inference concerning the drivers of forest cover variation across countries.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic Development and Forest Cover: Evidence from Satellite Data

Cuaresma

Danylo

Fritz

et al. 2017

Sci Rep

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Ongoing deforestation is a pressing, global environmental issue with direct impacts on climate change, carbon emissions, and biodiversity. There is an intuitive link between economic development and overexploitation of natural resources including forests, but this relationship has proven difficult to establish empirically due to both inadequate data and convoluting geo-climactic factors. In this analysis, we use satellite data on forest cover along national borders in order to study the determinants of deforestation differences across countries. Controlling for trans-border geo-climactic differences, we find that income per capita is the most robust determinant of differences in cross-border forest cover. We show that the marginal effect of per capita income growth on forest cover is strongest at the earliest stages of economic development, and weakens in more advanced economies, presenting some of the strongest evidence to date for the existence of at least half of an environmental Kuznets curve for deforestation.

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“…8 See, for example, Posner (2004). 9 For a discussion of these potential pitfalls, see McCauley and Posner (2015). 10 McCauley and Posner 2015.…”

Section: Explaining Variation In Religious Saliencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…3 Finke and Iannaccone 1993.4 Kalyvas 2000;Toft 2007.5 Levitt and List 2007. 6 For a review of studies that leverage African borders as sources of quasi-experimental leverage, seeMcCauley and Posner (2015).2 MC CAU LEY AND POSN ERhttps:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123416000594 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Political Sources of Religious Identification: Evidence from the Burkina Faso–Côte d’Ivoire Border

McCauley¹,

Posner²

2017

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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Under what conditions does religion become a salient social identity? By measuring religious attachment among the people living astride the Burkina Faso–Côte d’Ivoire border in West Africa, an arbitrary boundary that exposes otherwise similar individuals to different political contexts, this article makes a case for the importance of the political environment in affecting the weight that people attach to their religious identities. After ruling out explanations rooted in the proportion of different religious denominations, the degree of secularization and the supply of religious institutions on either side of the border, as well as differences in the degree of religious pluralism at the national level, it highlights the greater exposure of Ivorian respondents to the politicization of religion during Côte d’Ivoire’s recent civil conflict. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the power – and challenges – of exploiting Africa’s arbitrary borders as a source of causal leverage.

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African Borders as Sources of Natural Experiments Promise and Pitfalls

Cited by 79 publications

References 33 publications

The Ethnicity–Policy Preference Link in Sub-Saharan Africa

The Ethnicity–Policy Preference Link in Sub-Saharan Africa

Economic Development and Forest Cover: Evidence from Satellite Data

The Political Sources of Religious Identification: Evidence from the Burkina Faso–Côte d’Ivoire Border

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