In most studies of the impact of ethnic diversity on economic growth, diversity is hypothesized to affect growth through its effect on macroeconomic policies. This article shows that most measures of ethnic diversity (including the commonly used ELF measure) are inappropriate for testing this hypothesis. This is because they are constructed from enumerations of ethnic groups that include all of the ethnographically distinct groups in a country irrespective of whether or not they engage in the political competition whose effects on macroeconomic policy making are being tested. I present a new index of ethnic fractionalization based on an accounting of politically relevant ethnic groups in 42 African countries. I employ this measure (called PREG, for Politically Relevant Ethnic Groups) to replicate Easterly and Levine's influential article on Africa's "growth tragedy." I find that PREG does a Much better job of accounting for the policy-mediated effects of ethnic diversity on economic growth in Africa than does ELF.

This paper explores the conditions under which cultural cleavages become politically salient. It does so by taking advantage of the natural experiment afforded by the division of the Chewa and Tumbuka peoples by the border between Zambia and Malawi. I document that, while the objective cultural differences between Chewas and Tumbukas on both sides of the border are identical, the political salience of the division between these communities is altogether different. I argue that this difference stems from the different sizes of the Chewa and Tumbuka communities in each country relative to each country's national political arena. In Malawi, Chewas and Tumbukas are each large groups vis-a-vis the country as a whole and, thus, serve as viable bases for political coalition-building. In Zambia, Chewas and Tumbukas are small relative to the country as a whole and, thus, not useful to mobilize as bases of political support. The analysis suggests that the political salience of a cultural cleavage depends not on the nature of the cleavage itself (since it is identical in both countries) but on the sizes of the groups it defines and whether or not they will be useful vehicles for political competition.

In this dissertation, I examine the causal effect of election integrity on the responsiveness of elected officials in developing democracies. In many countries, domestic and international organizations regularly support interventions aimed at reducing electoral fraud. These efforts are rooted in the belief that fairer elections will strengthen the ability of citizens to control politicians and promote political responsiveness. However, we have no empirical support for this widely held belief. I describe a field experiment that randomized the deployment of roughly 1,300 election observers at different intensities across 60 electoral constituencies in Ghana. I leverage this experiment to test the effects of fairer elections on the responsiveness of Members of Parliament (MPs). Because the higher concentration of observers was associated with lower levels of election-day fraud and violence, the random assignment of election observation intensities across constituencies provides an instrument for levels of election integrity.I assess responsiveness using original data on how MPs in Ghana allocate their state- provided Constituency Development Funds to provide private benefits and public infrastructure to constituents. The results show that politicians elected in intensely monitored elections spend more of their CDFs, suggesting that fairer elections increase the effort of incumbents. Decomposing this effect, intense monitoring increases MPs’ spending on public goods but does not affect the level of private goods provision. Moreover, legislators elected in constituencies that had a higher presence of observers are more likely to abide by the national procurement laws when spending their funds, indicating that fairer elections also promote good governance. Overall, the findings suggest that the quality of elections is an important determinant of political responsiveness and provide the first causal evidence of the connection between election integrity and the performance of elected officials.

To explain my findings, I hypothesize that MPs exposed to high-intensity monitoring in the past improve their performance in office because they do not expect to have opportunities to commit fraud in future elections. I contend that the ability of politicians to rig elections influences incumbents’ levels of effort to meet the expectations of constituents. The ability to manipulate elections allows politicians to substitute fraud for effort without facing electoral consequences.

To investigate the effects of clean elections on the behavior of politicians, researchers need to manipulate incumbents’ beliefs about the integrity of future elections. To manipulate these expectations, I implement an experiment that randomized information to 60 of 120 MPs to say that they should expect to receive intense monitoring of their constituencies in Ghana’s December 2016 parliamentary elections. The control group did not receive such a letter. I argue that such information should motivate incumbents to work harder to satisfy the demands of citizens because they believe that they cannot rely on election-day fraud. Analysis of election results from the December 2016 election provides tentative support for my hypothesis. Future analyses of legislator spending of CDFs in 2016 would provide a definitive assessment of my primary explanation of the causal effect of fair elections on political responsiveness.

This paper looks to understand the current salience of national identity in South Sudan. It is based off of a study conducted between June and July of 2015 among a sample of 75 respondents in Juba, South Sudan. The paper focuses on the analysis of our outcomes and uses a historical lens to identify particular events and projects that may have contributed to differences of sentiments across demographics. It is found that although there are significant patterns of variation in identification among demographics, the concept of national identity remains strong. Due to significant limitations, the findings in this study should be considered preliminary. However, they should help to re-inform and update parochial discourses of ethnic attachment in South Sudan, and should add to larger discourses of national-identity and the nation state in many sub-Saharan African countries.

What motivates the emergence of secessionist movements, and why do individuals support secession once it becomes a salient issue? Scholars have argued that identitarian and economic factors motivate the emergence of secessionism and shape individuals’ preferences on secession, but they have examined only social groups among which secessionist movements have emerged and have not identified the specific ways in which identitarian and economic motivations shape secessionism in different types of regions. My project pioneers a novel approach to secessionism by identifying the universe of potentially secessionist social groups and introducing a theory of why the causal processes motivating secessionism might be different for different regions or groups. Using large-N cross-national analyses, case studies, interviews, and surveys, I examine how cultural identity and economic dynamics shape secessionism across a variety of contexts.

I test traditional theories of secessionism using an original dataset containing the universe of potentially secessionist social groups in Europe and the former Soviet Union. To reduce bias from selecting cases on the outcome of interest, my dataset includes a set of groups with potential but unrealized secessionism alongside groups that mobilized for secession. I show that theories that emphasize the role of natural resources and relative deprivation in motivating secessionism lose their explanatory power when tested over this improved sample.

I supplement this quantitative analysis by investigating the systematic reasons why economic grievances motivate secessionists in some places while identity-based grievances motivate secessionism in others. Through interviews, ethnographic research, and process tracing, I examine secessionism in Catalonia, Montenegro, Quebec, and Scotland. I show that in Scotland, economic factors have primacy in motivating secessionism, whereas identity-based factors drive secessionism in Quebec. In Catalonia, identitarian and materialist concerns interact to motivate secessionism, while anti-regime pressures encouraged secessionism in Montenegro.

I then examine survey data from Catalonia, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales to explore how cultural identity, socioeconomic status, and partisanship predict support for secession. I show that while regional identity is generally a strong predictor of support for secession, socioeconomic status and partisanship are weaker indicators, which problematizes traditional theories of public opinion and suggests that secession is fundamentally distinct from other political issues.

This project advances our identification of the causal mechanisms behind secessionism at both the cross-national and individual levels. My cross-national analysis shows that identity and economic factors are indeed important drivers of secessionism, while disaggregating secessionist regions shows how these factors shape secessionism in different contexts.

The distribution of cash to voters during elections, vote buying, is extremely widespread in many democracies. That vote buying is so widespread raises concerns about the quality of emerging democratic institutions and the potential for elections to deliver better and more accountable government. I develop a new theory to explain why politicians in new democracies distribute money to potential voters. I argue that cash handouts are effective because they convey information to voters about the extent to which a candidate will protect and serve their interests in the future, especially with respect to the provision of patronage resources. I test this informational theory with observational and experimental data collected in Kenya, as well with existing data from a larger set of African countries. As vote buying is secretive and sensitive, and so survey and interview responses are subject to response bias, I use several survey and experimental methods to improve descriptive and causal inferences about vote buying. In a variety of empirical tests, I provide evidence directly consistent with the informational theory; I show that patterns in the prevalence and geographic allocation of vote buying across and within African countries are best explained by the informational theory; and I provide evidence that helps to rule out existing explanations.

Chapter 2 analyzes data from a nationally representative survey and survey list experiment, a method that reduces response bias in survey questions, to show that cash handouts influenced the vote choice of about 20 percent of Kenyans during the country's 2007 elections. Chapter 3 presents the informational theory and provides preliminary evidence from existing ethnographic studies and survey data from 18 African countries. Chapter 4 shows that existing explanations for vote buying, which focus on the role of political machines or on the mobilization of voter turnout, are insufficient to explain widespread cash handouts in Kenya and other African settings.

Chapter 5 analyzes survey experimental data to show that, when Kenyan voters hear that a political candidate has distributed cash, they prefer that candidate to an otherwise identical candidate who has not done so. This effect is especially strong among poorer voters. Additionally, vote buying increases voters' expectations that a candidate will provide them with patronage and private benefits in the future, direct evidence consistent with the informational argument. Chapter 6 shows that, in conveying this information about patronage, vote buying reinforces and perpetuates patterns of ethnic voting---that is, the propensity of voters to support members of their own ethnic group at the polls. Experimental results show, in contrast to psychological or expressive theories of ethnic voting, that participants only prefer coethnic candidates and only expect to benefit from their patronage when they are engaged in vote buying. I demonstrate external validity by showing that vote buying has the most influence on vote choice when voters are targeted by members of their own ethnic group.

Chapter 7 uses data about the geographic allocation of local public goods projects in Kenya to show that vote buying is associated with more patronage allocations after an election. This result is consistent with the idea that handouts can be an informative signal about future performance. Chapter 8 shows that cash handouts not only help to convince voters that they should support a particular candidate, they also mobilize them to turn out to vote in order to gain access to the patronage resources that the patron will allocate in the future.

The last empirical chapter, Chapter 9, steps back from the question of why vote buying is effective to ask why vote-getting strategies takes the form of direct vote buying in some places but not others. With data from across Africa, I show that direct vote buying is most prevalent where local intermediaries, in this case traditional rulers, are not present or powerful enough to deliver large numbers of voters in a block. That is, politicians in Africa directly hand out cash in settings where they must win votes without the assistance of strong local brokers, a pattern that the informational theory is best suited to explain. I conclude the dissertation by discussing the implications of the results, which complicate normative interpretations of vote buying.

Why do voters tolerate poorly performing politicians? In African contexts, existing theory highlights lack of information, ethnic voting, and clientelistic equilibriums as potential explanations. Another explanation has remained overlooked: accountability is impaired by internalized racism, a psychological phenomenon wherein members of disadvantaged racial groups implicitly or explicitly adopt racist attitudes, ideologies, and behaviors instilled and perpetuated by dominant racial power structures. Notwithstanding its centrality in much African scholarship, political scientists have not investigated internalized racism as an explanation for impaired accountability, in large part because social scientists lack appropriate methodological tools to systematically document internalized racism and its effects.

My research addresses this gap. In this dissertation, I outline internalized racism’s character, origins, and relevance in African contexts. I then leverage data from an original survey among 600 Kenyan respondents toward two ends. First, I use survey data to develop and validate new explicit measures of internalized racism. Second, I use survey data to test three hypotheses regarding internalized racism’s impact on contemporary political attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors: (1) internalized racism alters political evaluations via motivated reasoning, (2) internalized racism increases perceptions and expectations of ethnic discrimination, and (3) internalized racism alters patterns of political participation. While the survey included an embedded experiment with a new intervention to reduce internalized racism, this initial attempt at causal identification did not prove successful. I therefore turn to observational analyses to test the three research hypotheses. I do not find compelling evidence that internalized racism affects political evaluations via racial motivated reasoning. However, I do find that internalized racism significantly predicts reported experiences of ethnic discrimination. Contrary to expectations, I do not find evidence that internalized racism depresses political efficacy or adversarial participation. However, I find evidence that internalized racism significantly predicts acceptance of clientelistic norms. The findings raising the possibility that internalized racism increases tendencies toward ethnic voting and drives persistent clientelism, thus impairing accountability and producing a self-fulfilling prophecy of poor-quality governance. This research adds depth to existing political science theory by shifting emphasis to racial identities in a context where scholars have deemphasized race in recent decades.