Redistributive Political Transitions: Minority Rule and Liberation Wars in Colonial Africa
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Authors | Jack Paine |
Journal/Conference Name | THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS |
Paper Category | Social Sciences |
Paper Abstract | Do class divisions and fear of redistribution impede political transitions? This article argues that tensions over economic redistribution in European settler colonies caused resisted enfranchisement and liberation wars in colonial Africa. It offers three main contributions. First, it identifies key scope conditions for redistributive transition models: in African settler colonies, the European elite monopolized the best agricultural land and could only secure their economic advantages by repressing majority ruleāalso incentivizing liberation wars. Second, it exploits a novel research design to assess redistributive theories. Statistical evidence from Africa during the decolonization era demonstrates that larger European settler population shares covary with smaller franchises and with more frequent colonial liberation wars. To account for the endogeneity of European settlement, the article introduces an instrument that measures climatic and other land suitability factors that affected where Europeans cou... |
Date of publication | 2019 |
Code Programming Language | R |
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