Complements or Substitutes? State Presence and the Power of Traditional Leaders -- Guest post by Soeren J. Henn

This is the twentieth in this year's series of posts by PhD students on the job market.

When we study how institutions affect development, we often focus on the characteristics of national institutions, such as whether a country is democratic, protects property rights, or has inclusive institutions. Yet villages in many developing countries contain almost no trace of these national institutions. Instead, life in rural villages is typically shaped by local leaders. In Sub-Saharan Africa, traditional leaders (namely village chiefs) are an important local institution. They control resources – most notably land – collect informal taxes, influence voting, and implement local development projects. The local importance of traditional leaders also concerns the nation-state. As national institutions attempt to increase their presence in the countryside, traditional leaders could act as complements or substitutes to state presence. They could either cooperate or compete with the public good provision by the state and thus enhance or weaken it.
 
In my job market paper, I study how local leaders and the national state interact. Specifically, I estimate the effect of state presence on the power, legitimacy, and effectiveness of village chiefs. In other words, do village chiefs become more or less influential when the national state is absent (or present) and how does this affect their public good provision? A key institutional feature in this context is that African states have used different strategies of dealing with traditional leaders that primarily vary on one dimension: whether chiefs are formally integrated into the state apparatus. I investigate how this institutional choice shapes the relationship between state presence and chiefs.