Land, Power, and Property Rights: The Political Economy of Land Titling in West Africa

My dissertation project explores an empirical puzzle in the politics of Africa: why formal do property rights remain so rare? An abundant literature shows that households who formalize their agricultural landholdings benefit relative to households that do not. Written land titles are available on-demand in many African countries. However, few households actually apply to formalize their land. To address this puzzle—the scarcity of formal property rights despite households possessing both motive and means to formalize—I combine traditional `shoe leather’ field work with field conjoint experiments, machine learning and text-as-data strategies, a natural experiment, spatial econometrics, and a series of oral histories and in-depth interviews.

Titling benefits households by enabling them to securely invest in their parcels. Households seek titles when the returns to agricultural investment are high enough to justify the cost of acquiring a land title. Customary elites such as village chiefs can impede or facilitate this process. In countries where land tenure issues are adjudicated at the national level, strong customary elites attenuate the relationship between the returns to agricultural investment and household uptake of property rights. In countries where customary elites can capture the titling process, titling enhances the chief’s political authority, and so strong customary elites strengthen the relationship between returns to agricultural investment and land tenure formalization.

My job market paper combines two empirical chapters from this dissertation. The first chapter uses 170,216 survey observations across 22 African countries to build a descriptive understanding of land titling rates and assess whether titling across African countries is consistent with this theory. I introduce a novel measure of agricultural land values, which captures both the attainable value of a parcel’s production and the potential returns to fertilizing the parcel or planting tree crops at a 10km-by-10km resolution. These data demonstrate that the interaction between a country’s land regime and the strength of local customary institutions moderates the relationship between returns to agricultural investment and the uptake of formal property rights. The second chapter uses an original survey of 801 household heads and 191 customary elites in Côte d’Ivoire, alongside two months of qualitative field work and administrative data, to exploit a natural experiment in which a village mapping process caused chiefs to receive an exogenous shock to their political authority. Chiefs pervade land titling via their unofficial role on village land management committees. Delimitation affects chiefly authority, and villages with strong customary chiefs possess more land titles. Strong customary chiefs also use their power to discriminate against relative newcomers to the village; these newcomers have fewer land titles and are less confident that land titles are actually useful.

If informal institutions influence the demand for titles, what about formal institutions? My third empirical chapter answers this question using a field conjoint experiment of 1,164 household heads in rural Senegal. I show that households who lack confidence in their local municipal councils place less weight on formal land titles when adjudicating hypothetical land disputes. Respondents consistently chose profiles with land titles to win the disputes, but the weight placed on land titles was significantly less among individuals who distrusted their local government. I use a structural topic model (STM) on free-response follow-up questions to show that respondents justify decisions using previous investments made on the parcels when titles are absent. I ground these results in three months of in-depth quantitative fieldwork in Senegal, which confirms that increased security is the primary benefit of titling. Through 82 elite interviews and oral histories of land conflicts, I document a meaningful distinction between individuals who describe titles as a guarantee and those who descrbe a title as merely useful.