What are the politics of traditional authority in the modern state? Scholars of Africa often depict traditional authority as antagonistic to the power of elected officials. But increasing anecdotal evidence reveals a more complex relationship that generates crucial political and economic consequences. I seek to explain the interaction between formal and informal political institutions in Ghana with a strategic analysis, describing both variation in cooperation and the political and developmental outcomes that result. I hypothesize that a strategic delegation relationship exists between elected local politicians (principals) and local chiefs (agents) to facilitate greater re-election success for candidates with chiefs influencing citizen vote choice. In exchange for this service, chiefs gain greater fiscal autonomy without interference by the government. This trade of services between chiefs and politicians both enriches chiefs financially and increases their legitimacy as powerful figures in the community. This increased power in the development sphere allows chiefs to parlay that influence into vote mobilization for certain candidates. As chiefs become more involved in coordinating fiscal decisions, the daily importance of elected government decreases. The delegation relationship between officials and chiefs weakens the electoral connections between politicians and citizens, ultimately lowering democratic competition.
To understand this delegation environment, I utilize several methods, combining nation-wide descriptive analysis, formal theory, and a large household survey in southern Ghana. I will use chiefly authority to explain electoral outcomes at the polling station level by using data from my measure of traditional power and electoral data to better understand the strategic considerations of this delegation. I will create a formal model of delegation with moral hazard, where the wage contract represents the level of fiscal autonomy chiefs are granted. Lastly, I will use a random natural experiment that has an intervention for the level of traditional authority in order to assess causal effects. I use information about the location of built and planned railroads in colonial Ghana to argue that modern transportation infrastructure weakened the traditional social fabric. I then plan to sample villages along the treatment and placebo rail lines to conduct a large household survey about voter mobilization, tax contribution, and public service access.
This project will have a number of broader impacts. It can help policymakers as they design political and economic development projects. Donor officials know the power that traditional authorities have over the success and failure of their projects, yet little research has been attempted to document and explain this power. Understanding the relationship between local politics and traditional authority is a great step toward designing policy that can more effectively meet its objectives. This research has the ability to influence how policy-makers view the role of informal political actors within the democratic process. Currently, Ghanaian chiefs are constitutionally barred from the political process. If I find evidence that chiefs undermine the democratic process, this could lead to enhanced voter education and anti-vote buying campaigns within Ghana. Conversely, if I find evidence of greater efficiency and quality of public services provided by local informal institutions, this might lead to greater delegation of fiscal authority and power for chiefs to promote local development, a policy that could have widespread implications beyond Ghana and Africa. By including informal and traditional authority into the scope of policy analysis within these societies, new strategies to enhance the democratic process and promote economic growth may be identified. The findings of this study will apply to Ghana specifically, but its lessons may apply to other developing country contexts as well.
During the year of 2012, the NSF grant was used to complete a 3000 person household survey in southern Ghana to examine the role that tribal chiefs play in local politics. Specifically, the NSF grant financed the hiring of survey enumerators in Ghana to conduct the survey as well as other operational expenses. I argue that local politicians delegate voter mobilization to powerful chiefs. In exchange for doing these activities, politicians lower the effective tax rate in communities, leaving more revenue for chiefs to collect with their own informal taxes and tributes. This means politicians are bankrupting local government in order to better secure reelection. Preliminary results from the survey have shown the following: 1) Powerful chiefs encourage higher rates of turnout in elections. 2) Powerful chiefs are associated with both greater incidents and levels of informal tax collection. 3) Powerful chiefs are associated with lower rates of vote buying by politicians directly. These findings match the theoretical delegation environment described in the original NSF grant, confirming many of the hypotheses. This project's intellectual merit comes from asking questions of how does democracy function when there are traditional and hierarchial governance structures that remain within the state. This concept is important to understanding new democracies, such as those thoughout Africa, but also has applications to other political environments such as urban patronage politics in the United States. Additionally, this project expands the concept of informal taxation beyond economics to understand why and when the state would allow potential tax revenue to be collected through non-state means, the answer being that it is an exchange of goods from the formal to informal sector. By answering questions about democratic consolidation in Africa, this project has the broader impact of providing insights into different distributions of political power between actors, which will help shape good governance policies.
