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Tribe or Nation? Nation Building and Public Goods in Kenya versus Tanzania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Edward Miguel
Edward Miguel
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

This article examines how government policies affect ethnic relations by comparing outcomes across two nearby districts, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania, using colonial-era boundary placement as a “natural experiment.” Despite similar geography and historical legacies, governments in Kenya and Tanzania have followed radically different language, education, and local institutional policies, with Tanzania consistently pursuing more serious nation building. The evidence suggests that nation building has allowed diverse communities in rural Tanzania to achieve considerably better local public goods outcomes than diverse communities in Kenya. To illustrate, while Kenyan communities at mean levels of diversity have 25 percent less local school funding than homogeneous communities on average, the comparable figure in the Tanzanian district is near zero. The Kenya-Tanzania comparison provides empirical evidence that serious reforms can ameliorate social divisions and suggests that nation-building should take a place on policy agendas, especially in Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , April 2004 , pp. 327 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2004

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74 Religious diversity is not included as an explanatory variable in the analysis since local religious affiliation is not plausibly exogenous due to extensive missionary activity in both districts. Correlations between religious fragmentation and local outcomes would be misleading if evangelical activity is most successful in the poorest areas or in areas with low levels of social capital. The numerical strength of “traditional” religions in Meatu—over 60 percent of the sample—also complicates the interpretation of the religious fragmentation index, since it is difficult to disentangle different traditional belief systems from ethnicity. Finally, since the most politically salient religious cleavage in East Africa is that between Christians and Muslims, the absence of large Muslim populations in these districts blunts the most likely source of religious divisions.

75 Miguel and Gugerty (fn. 6).

76 Ethnic diversity is unlikely to be proxying for higher local income inequality in Tanzanian villages, since the correlation between diversity and inequality is small, negative, and not statistically significant (regression not shown).

77 We attempted to examine analogous issues in the Kenyan district, but data on registered community group membership were only available for part of the study area. Restricting attention to registered community groups is also not ideal, since many groups are not registered in Kenya. The relationship between local diversity and registered group membership in this limited sample is typically negative (not shown), but due to the data limitations mentioned above, we do not highlight the Kenyan results.

78 Alesina and La Ferrara (fn. 8).

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