Keeping It in the Family: Lineage Organization and the Scope of Trust in Sub-Saharan Africa

Moscona, Jacob; Nunn, Nathan; Robinson, James A.

doi:10.1257/aer.p20171088

Cited by 58 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…In line with Robert Putnam's influential conjecture that strong family ties impede the development of general trust, Moscona, Nunn, and Robinson (2017b) find a trust gap for individuals from segmentary lineage ethnicities. Moscona, Nunn, and Robinson (2017a) further show that segmentary lineage societies experience more conflict today. Lowes (2017) shows that men and women from ethnicities with matrilineal kinship systems, where lineage and inheritance are traced via female family members, cooperate less, though children are, on average, more educated and healthier.…”

Section: Cultural Arrangementsmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…Conducting the analysis at the subnational level is not a panacea. Some studies employ spatial regression discontinuity designs, essentially comparing adjacent regions along the boundaries of centralized (lineage) and non-centralized (non-lineage) groups to uncover the impact of the former (e.g., Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2013) and Moscona, Nunn, and Robinson (2017a)). Although the spatial regression discontinuity framework has many merits, it is important to keep in mind that it cannot account for potential differences at the group level and heterogeneity.…”

Section: Discussion and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Historical Legacies and African Development

Michalopoulos

Papaioannou

2020

Journal of Economic Literature

114

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As Africa's role on the global stage is rising, so does the need to understand the shadow of history on the continent's economy and polity. We discuss recent works that shed light on Africa's colonial and precolonial legacies. The emerging corpus is remarkably interdisciplinary. Archives, ethnographic materials, georeferenced censuses, surveys, and satellite imagery are some of the sources often combined to test influential conjectures put forward in African historiography. Exploiting within-country variation and employing credible, albeit mostly local, identification techniques, this recent literature has uncovered strong evidence of historical continuity as well as instances of rupture in the evolution of the African economy. The exposition proceeds in reverse chronological order. Starting from the colonial period, which has been linked to almost all of Africa's post-independence maladies, we first review works that uncover the lasting legacies of colonial investments in infrastructure and human capital and quantify the role of various extractive institutions, such as indirect rule and oppression associated with concessionary agreements. Second, we discuss the long-lasting impact of the "Scramble for Africa" which led to ethnic partitioning and the creation of artificial modern states. Third, we cover studies on the multi-faceted legacy of the slave trades. Fourth, we analyze the contemporary role of various precolonial, ethnic-specific, institutional and social traits, such as political centralization. We conclude by offering some thoughts on what we view as open questions.

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Section: Cultural Arrangementsmentioning

confidence: 84%

Section: Discussion and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historical Legacies and African Development

Michalopoulos

Papaioannou

2020

Journal of Economic Literature

114

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“…[The fault lines in rural India are between castes, not between clans as they are, for example, in parts of Africa, tribal regions of S. Asia, and the Middle East where clans have their own rural territory to administer (22). Unlike tribes, castes are deeply embedded within political society.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural impediments to learning to cooperate: An experimental study of high- and low-caste men in rural India

Brooks

Hoff

Pandey

2018

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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We report experimental findings on how individuals from different cultures solve a repeated coordination game of common interest. The results overturn earlier findings that fixed pairs are almost assured to coordinate on an efficient and cooperative equilibrium. Subjects in the prior experiments were US university students, whereas the subjects in our study are men drawn from high and low castes in rural India. Most low-caste pairs quickly established an efficient and cooperative convention, but most high-caste pairs did not. The largest difference in behavior occurred when a player suffered a loss because he had tried to cooperate but his partner did not: In this situation, high-caste men were far less likely than low-caste men to continue trying to cooperate in the next period. Our interpretation is that for many high-caste men, the loss resulting from coordination failure triggered retaliation. Our results are robust to controls for education and wealth, and they hold by subcaste as well as by caste status. A survey we conducted supports the ethnographic evidence that more high-caste than low-caste men prefer to retaliate against a slight. We find no evidence that caste differences in trust or self-efficacy explain the caste gap in cooperation in our experiment. Our findings are of general interest because many societies throughout the world have cultures that lead individuals to (mis)perceive some actions as insults and to respond aggressively and dysfunctionally.

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“…Other studies show that strong family ties are negatively associated with a range of variables that are conducive to economic growth and institutional quality, such as geographical mobility, female and young adult labor force participation (Alesina & Giuliano, 2010), political interest and activity (Alesina & Giuliano, 2011), and trust in strangers (Ermisch & Gambetta, 2010). Recently and in a similar vein, Moscona, Nunn, and Robinson (2017) show that segmentary lineage societies (i.e., societies that are organized around family ties and lineages) have lower levels of social trust than societies that put less emphasis on family ties. However, Ljunge (2015) finds that individuals with strong family ties are more likely than those with weak family ties to disapprove of tax and benefit cheating and corruption.…”

Section: Family Systems Inheritance Rules and Institutional Qualitymentioning

confidence: 94%

Inheritance regimes: Medieval family structures and current institutional quality

Broms

Kokkonen

2019

Governance

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This study highlights the impact that medieval patterns of intrafamily inheritance practices wield on contemporary institutional quality. We argue that regions that practiced inegalitarian inheritance developed stronger institutions than regions that practiced egalitarian inheritance, for two reasons. First, we argue that transmitting land to a single heir resulted in a sense of personal ownership and, by extension, encouraged individual property rights. Second, we argue that the fact that disinherited children were incentivized to seek training and employment outside the family domicile in regions practicing inegalitarian inheritance resulted in trust‐building social interactions. We test our argument using data on medieval inheritance patterns and modern‐day institutional quality in European subnational regions and across countries globally. Our results show that historical inegalitarian inheritance practices are strongly positively associated with contemporary institutional quality. We conclude that historical norms at the family level are still affecting important modern‐day societal functions.

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Keeping It in the Family: Lineage Organization and the Scope of Trust in Sub-Saharan Africa

Cited by 58 publications

References 15 publications

Historical Legacies and African Development

Historical Legacies and African Development

Cultural impediments to learning to cooperate: An experimental study of high- and low-caste men in rural India

Inheritance regimes: Medieval family structures and current institutional quality

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