Early Statehood and Support for Autocratic Rule in Africa

Abstract

Recent work highlights the importance of pre-modern political practices for explaining persistent institutional features, including representative democracy. Typically, this argument is institutional in nature—pre-industrial practices are hypothesized to either bolster or retard the transmission of democratic institutions. This article proposes a separate channel through which legacies of early statehood continue to impact the prospects of democratic governance. Using survey data from Africa, we document a positive relationship between early statehood development and support for autocratic rule among ordinary Africans. This finding is robust to a wide range of pre- and post-treatment covariates, country and survey round fixed effects, as well as an instrumental-variable design. The identified relationship is particularly prominent in respondents from precolonially centralized ethnic groups in former British colonies, suggesting the importance of locally surviving traditional institutions for propagation of norms that owe their origins to precolonial autocratic socialization.