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The share of ethnic groups is one of the most important features of African politics. It affects civil wars, representation in government positions, distributive and allocative policies. In this paper we use the partition of ethnic groups as a natural experiment in order to estimate the effect of the share of these ethnic groups on development. We show that larger groups have an advantage in terms of development and that the partition in itself does not matter for development. This result is explained by the fact that the partition matters only when the resulting groups are relatively small, since their lack of political representation may weaken support for institutions, may bias policies and the provision of ethnic/regional public goods.

We argue that the partition of ethnic groups following the Scramble for Africa does not itself matter for development in Africa. It matters only when the partitioned groups are relatively small because small groups lack political representation which may promote ethnic mobilization and foster support for informal (rather than formal) institutions which then may a ect development. Furthermore, the analysis of data from the Afrobarometer shows that the persistence of informal/tribal institutions related to property rights and the rule of law is one of the possible channels through which the size of the partitioned group a ects development

We evaluate the empirical effectiveness of de facto versus de jure determinants of political power in the U.S. South between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Using previously-unexploited racially-disaggregated data on voter registration in Mississippi for the years 1896 and 1899, we show that the observed pattern of black political participation is driven by de facto disfranchisement as captured by the presence of a black political majority, which negatively affects black registration. The de jure provisions introduced with the 1890 state constitution and involving literacy tests and poll taxes exert a non-robust impact. Furthermore, a difference-in-differences approach shows that the decline in aggregate turnout pre-dates the introduction of de jure restrictions and confirms a causal effect of the presence of a black political majority. De jure restrictions intensify the influence of the latter after 1890, which suggests that the main effect of the constitutional reforms may have been an institutionalization of de facto disfranchisement.

AbstractWe argue that the reason why it has proved hard to determine whether negative effects on economic performance and conflict are more strongly associated with polarized rather than fractionalized societies is because the distinction between polarization and fractionalization is only relevant for societies with ethnic diversity above a certain threshold. In addition, high levels of ethnic fractionalization at a country level are generally associated with regional concentration of minorities, and as a result, many regions may have a very different ethnic composition from the national average, and in particular, they may have much higher levels of ethnic polarization than the national level. Because of the very different ethnic composition of different regions in this situation, conflict is more likely to be confined to a limited geographical area.

We evaluate the empirical relevance of de facto vs. de jure determinants of political power in the U.S. South between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. We apply a variety of estimation techniques to a previously unexploited dataset on voter registration by race covering the counties of Mississippi in 1896, shortly after the introduction of the 1890 voting restrictions encoded in the state constitution. Our results indicate that de jure voting restrictions reduce black registration but that black disfranchisement starts well before 1890 and is more intense where a black majority represents a threat to the de facto power of white elites. Moreover, the effect of race becomes stronger after 1890 suggesting that the de jure barriers may have served the purpose of institutionalizing a de facto condition of disfranchisement.

We investigate the long term determinants of political and economic outcomes over a new data set composed of Mississippi counties. We analyze the effect of disfranchisement on voting registration at the end of the nineteenth century (1896-9), as well as the impact of voting registration on education outcomes at different points in time, namely in 1917 and in the 1950s. Finally, we turn to the determinants of a broad array of development indicators for the year 1960 and for the 1960-2000 period. Our main conclusion is that race, rather than political institutions and education policies, is the main force driving the above outcomes.

Growth rates of per capita GDP are depressed by civil conflict to a degree that reflects its severity. Only the more severe conflicts - ones that affect at least half of the country by land area and/or cause more than 1,000 fatalities in at least one year - have a significant negative growth effect. Post-conflict recovery of output is enhanced by aid flows but this finding may be subject to endogeneity bias.

It is very common to analyse the factors associated with the onset and continuation of civil wars entirely separately, as if there were likely to be no similarity between them. This is an overstatement of the theoretical position, which has established only that they may be different (i.e. less than perfectly correlated). The hypothesis that the explanatory variables are the same is not theoretically excludable and is empirically testable, both for individual variables and for combinations of them. Starting from this approach yields a rather different picture of the factors associated with the continuation of civil wars, because the relatively small sample size means that confidence intervals on individual coefficients are wide in this case. It is shown here that country size, mountainous terrain and (in most datasets) ethnic diversity seem significant for the continuation of civil wars, starting from the null hypothesis that variables affect onset and continuation probabilities identically, rather than entirely independently. One variable that affects onset and continuation significantly differently is anocracy, which we find to matter only for onset. Civil war is more likely if it occurred two years previously, as well as one year previously, which indicates that wars are more likely to restart after only one year of peace, and also more likely to stop in their first year. The combined model strengthens the result that ethnic diversity matters (it is consistently significant across datasets, whereas it is not when onset is analysed separately), although in the UCD/PRIO dataset it is significant only for onset. By contrast, if continuation is analysed independently, virtually nothing is significant except a pre-1991 dummy and a dummy for civil war two years previously.

We investigate the determinants of onset, duration and incidence of civil wars, and their sensitivity to different coding rules. Whatever the coding rule used, incidence of civil war is largely determined by poverty, country size, mountainous terrain and ethnic diversity. Poverty reduces the opportunity cost of rebellion, and mountainous terrain makes rebellions harder to defeat, while ethnic diversity creates potential conflict, since some linguistic groups may feel under-represented. Continuation and onset of civil war are non-overlapping subsets of incidence, depending on whether civil war occurred in the previous year. We exploit this aspect to test whether the determinants of continuation and onset are statistically significantly different. For four out of five coding rules, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of common determinants of civil war onset and continuation. This is the main contribution of the paper. Ethnic diversity is particularly high in Africa, where many civil wars occur, but we show that the significance of ethnic diversity is not just an unidentified Africa effect. Our estimated model works as well for Africa as for other areas. There is evidence that ethnic polarization matters as well as fractionalization. We show that polarization understates the propensity for conflict in societies with high ethnic diversity, where the polarization measure tends to be low, but otherwise outperforms fractionalization as a predictor of conflict. Mountainous terrain is generally not significant when ethnic polarization is included.