Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics: Representation and Redistribution in Decentralized West Africa

 Why  are some communities able to come together to improve their collective  lot while others are not? Looking at variation in local government  performance in decentralized West Africa, this book advances a novel  answer: communities are better able to coordinate around basic service  delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with  informal social institutions, or norms. This book identifies the  precolonial past as the driver of striking subnational variation in the  present because these social institutions only encompass the many  villages of the local state in areas that were once home to precolonial  polities. The book develops and tests a theory of institutional  congruence to document how the past shapes contemporary elite approaches  to redistribution within the local state. Where precolonial kingdoms  left behind collective identities and dense social networks, local  elites find it easier to cooperate following decentralization.