Attention land predators! Power and Property in Rural West Africa
My book project, “Attention Land Predators! Power and Property in Rural West Africa,” responds to an empirical puzzle in the politics of Africa: why do formal property rights remain so rare? Abundant research documents how households who obtain formal property rights for their agricultural land benefit relative to households that do not. Formal property rights are available throughout most African countries, but few households use them. I combine traditional ‘shoe leather’ field work with survey experiments, machine learning and text-as-data strategies, spatial econometrics, and a natural experiment to explain this puzzle.
The answer to this question has two parts. First, households do not urgently demand formal land titles because informal land governance already provides outcomes which resemble formal law. Households can appeal decisions rendered by the traditional chiefs who enforce property rights under customary governance; this appellate structure gives chiefs an incentive to align customary governance with formal norms to avoid being overruled. Second, when households adopt formal property rights, they erode the authority of these customary institutions. Chiefs, therefore, have strong incentives to impede formal titling—except where they are able to capture or control local land tenure institutions.
To demonstrate the alignment between formal and informal land tenure governance, the first chapter of the book uses a series of conjoint experiments administered to 3,290 household heads across rural Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Sénégal which, present respondents with hypothetical land disputes and ask respondents which party would win. Households under both customary and formal land governance use similar rationales to adjudicate the disputes. I then estimate a structural topic model using free-response questions asked with each conjoint round to document the rich set of norms with which respondents adjudicate disputes.
The following chapter theorizes the reason for this institutional alignment: forum-shopping is a vertical rather than horizontal process, which creates incentives for chiefs to rule in accordance with formal law. To document this dynamic, I rely on over a hundred oral histories of land conflicts I collected across rural Sénégal, alongside a series of vignette experiments administered to 1,325 household heads in Liberia.
The second component which explains this empirical puzzle is that local constellations of power constrain the uptake of formal property rights. In the subsequent chapter, I argue when citizens take their property disputes to informal institutions, they ‘bootstrap’ the informal institution’s authority to resolve conflict. Expanding formal property rights, therefore, erodes the strength of customary institutions. I use a series of vignette experiments administered to 1,325 household heads across rural Liberia, to show this process in action: learning about formal land governance increases respondents’ confidence in their formal institutions, but only erodes respondents’ trust in their customary institutions once others begin using the formal institutions.
However, formal land governance need not always weaken customary institutions. Strong customary chiefs capture formal land tenure institutions where land governance is devolved, preserving their authority while advancing their agendas. In the following chapter, I combine two months of qualitative field work, an original field survey of 801 household heads and 194 customary elites, and administrative data on land titling within a process-tracing framework to evidence how local elites capture land tenure institutions in Côte d’Ivoire. My job market paper, published in the American Political Science Review, uses material from this and the subsequent chapter to illustrate this component of the broader theory.
A final chapter tests the generality of this theory. Using survey data from 22 African countries, a novel geospatial measure of land values, and historical data on the boundaries of pre-colonial customary institutions, I document sub-national variation in the uptake of formal land governance. These data demonstrate that decentralized and centralized land regimes interact with strong local customary chiefs to moderate the relationship between returns to agricultural investment and the uptake of formal property rights—in line with my broader theory.