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Ethnic favouritism in Kenyan education reconsidered: when a picture is worth more than a thousand regressions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2020

Rebecca Simson  and
Elliott Green
Rebecca Simson*
Affiliation:
Wadham College, University of Oxford, Parks Road, OxfordOX1 3PN, UK
Elliott Green*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, LondonWC2A 2AE, UK
*
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Does a leader's ethnicity affect the regional distribution of basic services such as education in Africa? Several influential studies have argued in the affirmative, by using educational attainment levels to show that children who share the ethnicity of the president during their school-aged years have higher attainment than their peers. In this paper we revisit this empirical evidence and show that it rests on problematic assumptions. Some models commonly used to test for favouritism do not take adequate account of educational convergence and once this is properly accounted for the results are found to be unstable. Using Kenya as a test case, we argue that there is no conclusive evidence of ethnic favouritism in primary or secondary education, but rather a process of educational convergence among the country's larger ethnic groups. This evidence matters, as it shapes how we understand the ethnic calculus of politicians.

Keywords

Ethnic favouritismKenyaeducationethnicitydistributive politicspatronage
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , September 2020 , pp. 425 - 460
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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Footnotes

We would like to thank the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics for producing the underlying data on which this paper rests. We are also grateful for the comments from Mahvish Shami and the two anonymous peer reviewers.

References

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