Colonial Education, Political Elites, and Regional Political Inequality

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CPSXXX10.1177/0010414021997176Comparative Political StudiesRicart-Huguet
Article
Comparative Political Studies
Colonial Education,
2021, Vol. 54(14) 2 546–2580
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997176
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021997176
Regional Political journals.sagepub.com/home/cps
Inequality in Africa
Joan Ricart-Huguet1
Abstract
Political elites tend to favor their home region when distributing resources.
But what explains how political power is distributed across a country’s
regions to begin with? Explanations of cabinet formation focus on short-
term strategic bargaining and some emphasize that ministries are allocated
equitably to minimize conflict. Using new data on the cabinet members
(1960–2010) of 16 former British and French African colonies, I find that
some regions have been systematically much more represented than others.
Combining novel historical and geospatial records, I show that this regional
political inequality derives not from colonial-era development in general
but from colonial-era education in particular. I argue that post-colonial
ministers are partly a byproduct of civil service recruitment practices among
European administrators that focused on levels of literacy. Regional political
inequality is an understudied pathway through which colonial legacies impact
distributive politics and unequal development in Africa today.
JEL: F54, I26, N37, N47
Keywords
political elites, cabinets, colonialism, education, regional inequality, Africa
1
Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, USA
Corresponding Author:
Joan Ricart-Huguet, Department of Political Science, Loyola University Maryland, 4501 North
Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21210-2601, USA.
Email: jricart-huguet@loyola.edu
2Ricart-Huguet 2547
Comparative Political Studies 00(0)
In a political system where nearly every adult may vote but where knowledge,
wealth, social position, access to officials, and other resources are unequally
distributed, who actually governs?
Dahl (1961, p. 1)
Introduction
Political elites fundamentally shape political representation, conflict, and the
distribution of resources. Existing research shows that presidents and minis-
ters disproportionately favor their home region, especially in less democratic
countries (Andre et al., 2018; Hodler & Raschky, 2014; Kramon & Posner,
2016). As Bates (1974, p. 470) argued, “in the political arena, it is not just
power that is at stake, but also the benefit which power can bring.” In this
article, I begin by showing that political power is unequally distributed within
African countries: some regions are heavily over-represented in cabinets
while others are underrepresented. This presents an important puzzle: What
explains the regional distribution of political power to begin with? More spe-
cifically, what explains the share of ministers hailing from each of a country’s
regions or districts?1
Existing literature offers two explanations of cabinet formation: regional
favoritism and regional balancing. Regional favoritism emphasizes that the
making of the cabinet is the result of short-term regional and ethnic strategic
considerations such as patronage (Arriola, 2009). In 1970s Uganda, Colonel
Idi Amin filled his cabinet with people from West Nile, his home region. In
Côte d’Ivoire, Houphouët-Boigny’s cabinets favored the Baoulé, his ethnic
group. Meanwhile, regional balancing posits that “representation in a presi-
dent’s cabinet [. . .] has to appear to be equitable” (Keller, 1983, p. 259) to
deter conflict. “President Kenyatta’s announcement of three ministerial
appointments from Nyanza province in July 1969 was clearly calculated to
appease the aggrieved feelings of the Luo people following the assassination
of Tom Mboya, one of Kenya’s founding fathers” (Rothchild, 1970, p. 605).
Consistent with this example, Francois et al. (2015, p. 472) show that ethnic
group shares in the cabinet are correlated with population shares.
I contend that both explanations are incomplete and possibly shortsighted
because they only examine the short-term strategy of politicians (Laver &
Shepsle, 1996), ignore the historical origins of elites, and cannot account for
the persistent regional political inequality that I uncover. Figure 1 shows the
percentages of minister-years (most ministers stay in power for more than
1 year) by district in Uganda and Senegal between 1960 and 2010.2 If regional
balancing produced equitable distributions of minister-year shares, then the
2548
Ricart-Huguet Comparative Political Studies 54(14)3
Uganda
minister share minister share - population share

20
6 4
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2
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ub ja
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ile
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An ezi
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e
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Senegal
minister share minister share - population share
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5 10
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Percentage
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sa ar
um
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Figure 1. Minister-shares by district of birth (1960–2010 average).

The left figures show the percentage of minister-years born in each colonial district (1960–
2010 average). The right figures subtract district population shares (1960–2010 average) from
that percentage.
distribution would be uniform (the left graphs would be flat) or proportional

to population (the right graphs would be flat). Neither is the case. Some dis-
tricts have systematically punched above their weight since independence
and others below. Averaged over 1960 to 2010, 14% of the minister-years in
Uganda were born in Ankole district despite its population being only 9% of
Uganda’s total. 14% of the minister-years in Senegal were born in Saint Louis
even though the district comprises less than 2% of Senegal’s population.
Regional favoritism alone cannot explain the patterns in Figure 1 either.
Ankole district in Uganda is over-represented partly because President
Museveni (1986–) was born there. However, patronage-type explanations
beg the question of why leaders hail from one district or another in the first
place. Further, other districts beyond the president’s are over-represented.
Regional favoritism cannot explain the case of Saint Louis either: no
Senegalese president was born there. More generally, and in spite of politi-
cal instability in many East and West African countries, district representa-
tion in the 1960s correlates with district representation in the 2000s
( ρ = 0.46 ), thus suggesting underlying and persistent inequalities in politi-
cal representation.
4Ricart-Huguet 2549
In lieu of short-term strategic explanations, I offer a deeper historical

explanation rooted in the colonial period. Most literature on colonialism
focuses on its consequences for economic development. Instead, I leverage
the colonization of East and West Africa to examine how colonialism influ-
enced the distribution of political power in the short and long run. I show
that colonial investments in education—but not in infrastructure, health, or
other development proxies—increase cabinet shares by district in post-
colonial governments. The political effect of education, proxied by the
number of teachers and missionaries per district, is larger in earlier decades
but persists after 1990 in spite of regime changes and instability during the
Cold War.
My findings are based on original biographical data of the roughly 5,000
ministers in cabinets between 1960 and 2010 for the 16 former British and
French colonies in East and West Africa. I georeference the ministers’ birth
location using colonial maps with district boundaries and complement these
data with district-level colonial investment records and other variables.
I argue that post-colonial ministers are a byproduct of education-based
recruitment into the colonial state. East and West African colonies were poor
and largely self-financed, so European administrators faced severe budget
constraints (Young, 1994) and recruited educated Africans as civil servants to
reduce costs (Mazrui, 1978). As a result, districts with more primary educa-
tion became more represented in the civil service and in legislative councils
because Europeans had little concern for regional balancing. Regional politi-
cal inequality was the unintended long-term consequence of this selection
criterion whereby education conditioned the pool of potential ministers from
a region. Literacy and numeracy learned in school were transferable to the
civil service (Mazrui, 1978; Sharkey, 2013). In turn, organizational skills
acquired in the civil service and in colonial legislatures provided some with
an early advantage in post-colonial politics that persists even today. For
example, Saint Louis had ceded much of its early importance to Dakar, the
economic and political capital, by 1900. However, Saint Louis remained an
important center of primary and secondary education and that would prove
crucial for its over-representation after 1960.
Support for two sub-hypotheses strengthens the main argument. First,
military men were not members of the colonial civil service or legislature.
Hence, I find that the effect of colonial education is larger in civilian than in
military governments. Second, the expansion of education after indepen-
dence reduced early human capital constraints and the 1990s wave of democ-
ratization led to more political inclusion. Hence, the effect of colonial
education, although it persists post-1990, is larger in earlier decades
(1960–1989).
2550
To alleviate endogeneity concerns, I account for historical factors that

drove educational investments, test for alternative explanations that distin-
guish education from state capacity or development more generally, and
employ regional fixed effects and Oster bounds. Finally, I use a new match-
ing method to reduce model dependence and bias from model
misspecification.
This article makes three main contributions. First, unlike existing research
focused on short-term strategic considerations, I provide a long-term expla-
nation of cabinet formation and regional political inequality. This historical
dimension is difficult to study because governments and states are typically
formed as the result of long endogenous processes in Europe and elsewhere
(Boix, 2015). Political elites allocate resources that in turn produce the fol-
lowing generation of elites, and so forth. The short but pervasive colonization
of East and West Africa, during which European conquest fundamentally
shaped political and socioeconomic structures, alleviates this problem.
Second, most existing social science literature examines the consequences
of colonialism for development (Nunn, 2009) and for democratization and
conflict (Englebert et al., 2002; Woodberry, 2012) but rarely for elite forma-
tion and the distribution of political power.3 Further, institutions rather than
investments are central in most accounts (Acemoglu et al., 2001; Lange et al.,
2006). Instead, I emphasize that districts with higher investments in educa-
tion a century ago are more developed and educated today, and that regional
political inequality may be a key mechanism to understand why. Political
elites may be partly reproducing rather than reducing the large inequalities
inherited from the colonial past.
Third, I contribute two novel datasets: one with information on around
5,000 African political elites and another with colonial investments records
and other colonial and pre-colonial characteristics. The difficulty of system-
atically collecting such data across colonies and empires may explain why, in
spite of abundant research on colonial legacies, few examine the conse-
quences of actual colonial investments. The rest of the article proceeds as
follows. Section 2 further motivates the article and section 3 develops the
argument. Section 4 discusses the relevant historical context. Sections 5 and
6 present the data and results, respectively. Section 7 concludes.
The Importance of Cabinets in African Politics

“Who rules” has a fair claim to be the central question of empirical political
science, just as its normative counterpart, “Who should rule?” is perhaps the
central question of political philosophy.
Putnam (1976, p. 2)
6Ricart-Huguet 2551
Cabinet ministers are important to understand political representation, the dis-

tribution of resources, and conflict, especially in semi- and non-democratic
countries where legislatures and other formal institutions are often weak.
Kramon and Posner (2016, p. 1) present evidence that “ministerial appoint-
ments [in Kenya] come with real power to impact distributive politics,” Andre
et al. (2018) present similar findings for Benin, and Franck and Rainer (2012)
and Haass and Ottmann (2020) present similar findings across Africa.4 Hodler
and Raschky (2014, p. 995) show that the birth region of the current leader
develops more than the rest, especially in developing countries. On conflict,
Arriola (2009) shows that increasing cabinet size reduces the probability of a
coup by accommodating diverse groups, while Cederman et al. (2010) show
that politically excluded ethnoregional groups are more likely to instigate
coups and civil wars.
These findings are an important reason why the study of political elites
and cabinet ministers, once central to political science (Putnam, 1976), is
resurging (Fresh, 2018; Kroeger, 2018; Hartnett, 2019; Paniagua, 2019;
Ricart-Huguet, 2019; Carbone & Pellegata, 2020; Nyrup & Bramwell, 2020).
I focus on cabinet ministers rather than legislators as the key political elites
for two reasons. First, legislatures take population into account when devis-
ing constituencies and thereby address regional political inequality by
design.5 Second, “the cabinet has served as the undisputed locus of power
sharing” in almost all African countries since independence (Arriola &
Johnson, 2014, p. 11). Ministers cannot be MPs in most former French colo-
nies, as in semi-presidential France, while ministers have to be MPs in many
former British colonies, as in parliamentary Great Britain.6 In both sets of
colonies, ministerial posts have long had an important representative dimen-
sion that is very limited in the cabinets of democracies (Cohen, 1988).
I define a district’s representation as the share of cabinet members that
were born in that district. Throughout the article, district refers to the colonial
administrative units that constitute my unit of analysis while region is used
more generically (Appendix D explains why districts and not ethnic groups
constitute my unit of analysis).
East and West African colonies provide a unique opportunity to study
political elites when independent governments first form and to move beyond
the short-term and strategic study of cabinet formation. This is for several
reasons. First, the external imposition of colonial institutions alleviates his-
torical endogeneity with respect to colonial state formation processes. Indeed,
colonies of the same empire present very similar institutional structures.
Colonialism rocked the political organization of society because highly cen-
tralized governments were the exception in the pre-colonial period. Second,
investments were largely decided by European outsiders rather than the
2552
native population. Third, the British and the French implemented standard
data collection procedures that allow comparisons between and within
colonies.
Beyond Strategic Cabinet Formation: The Colonial

Origins of African Cabinets
Budget Constraints Result in Education-Based Recruitment
London and Paris expected their colonies in East and West Africa to be self-
sufficient in all domains other than the military. Metropolitan funds, such as
grants-in-aid, were scarce before 1945 (Constantine, 1984, p. 14, p. 84;
Gardner, 2012, p. 9) so generating revenue and reducing costs were para-
mount for these colonial states (Young, 1994, p. 124).
European colonial administrators limited expenditures by selecting liter-
ate natives to join the civil service, initially in the lower echelons and later in
positions of more responsibility. Colonial states in Africa were “thin on the
ground” and “skeletal” (Young, 1994, p. 124), so this practice reduced their
shortage of administrators. Europeans “from the start had been training and
hiring African men as petty government employees, who typed and filed
papers, surveyed plots of land, taught in government schools, disbursed med-
icines, counted revenues and more” (Sharkey, 2013, p. 165). Europeans pre-
ferred to hire metropolitan administrators, but budget constraints induced
them to minimize costs by recruiting Africans instead (Mazrui, 1978).
“Evolués” and “Europeanised Africans”—the racist terms used in each
empire to denote Western-educated Africans—were also recruited into
assemblées territoriales and legislative councils. Lugard (1922, p. 78), argu-
ably the most influential colonial administrator in British Africa, considered
that Western education had seen “remarkable results: The Europeanised
African, defined by its education and Christian morals, occupies the positions
of importance. For example, they sit in the Legislative Councils.”
Education was critical to selection into the civil service and legislatures
but Europeans disregarded district population, a key factor to understand
imbalances after independence. More educated districts, such as Saint
Louis in Senegal, were over-represented in the colonial civil service because
the French did not (care to) balance the regional composition of the civil
service. In Nigeria, where regionalism and ethnicity were more salient than
in Senegal, the British did not balance the civil service either. Eastern dis-
tricts with high missionary activity composed the majority of civil servants
even in Northern Nigeria. This source of tension during colonial rule inten-
sified after independence and contributed to the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War
8Ricart-Huguet 2553
(1967–1970). Post-independence political conflict lay not only in regionally

imbalanced colonial militaries (Wilkinson, 2015; Harkness, 2016) but also in
regionally imbalanced colonial bureaucracies.
Colonial Institutions as Mechanisms of Regional Political

Inequality
I argue that the colonial civil service and legislature are the two colonial-era
mechanisms that explain why unequal education provision across districts in
particular—rather than unequal development in general—carried political
consequences after independence. Literacy and numeracy learned in school
were transferable to the public sector. Building on Le Vine (1968, p. 380), I
contend that the “expertise and political skill acquired” in the civil service
and the legislature provided an incumbency advantage of sorts at
independence.
The advantages derived from membership in the civil service were not
political but, nonetheless, civil servants enjoyed prestige and name recogni-
tion (Mazrui, 1978), two key mechanisms of incumbency advantage. They
also garnered bureaucratic and management skills as they undertook senior
positions after World War II. Colonial legislatures were rubber-stamp institu-
tions until the 1950s.7 However, a seat conferred relevant experience, politi-
cal skills, and name recognition to their African members and enabled future
leaders, such as Senghor in Senegal and Obote in Uganda, to build a base of
support prior to independence.
Thus, and while often not the explicit political intention of European
administrators, post-independence ministers are partly a byproduct of educa-
tion-based recruitment into these two colonial institutions (Figure 2). The
theory extends to ministers past the immediate post-colonial period because
66% of ministers in the 1960–2010 period were born before 1942 and hence
grew up and were socialized under colonialism.8
I specify that ministers are partly a byproduct of education-based recruit-
ment because regional balancing efforts right before independence probably
reduced regional inequality. In British colonies, rebalancing efforts were
often engineered at the Lancaster House Conferences, where independence
agreements between Britain and several colonies were crafted. In Nigeria, for
instance, the “[British] manipulation of the political situation just before
independence meant to facilitate Northern leadership at the center” (Rothchild,
1970, p. 602) and reduce their alienation—the North was more populous and
yet much less represented in the civil service than the East. Regionalism also
existed in some French colonies like Dahomey (Benin), whose elites devised
2554
Figure 2. The political consequences of unequal education provision across

districts.
The diagram depicts the causal chain from colonial investments in education to minister-
shares by district. Two colonial institutions, the civil service and the legislature, are the
mechanisms.
power-sharing arrangements at independence. The early 1960s were momen-

tous, but disregarding the pre-independence period leads to a fundamentally
incomplete understanding of political elite and cabinet formation.
My argument is far from attributing virtue or a fulfillment of the “white
man’s burden.” Selecting on education was a reasonable choice for adminis-
trators ruling over cash-strapped colonies. Financial and administrative needs
explain why the extent of education in one’s home district, rather than levels
of development across districts more generally, is key to understand political
elite formation and ultimately who governs after independence.
Hypotheses
The central hypothesis is that the level of education in a district during colo-
nial rule should predict the minister-share of that district after independence.
The counterfactual is therefore at the district level: between two otherwise
equivalent districts, the district with higher colonial education should be
more represented, as proxied by its minister share, after colonialism. Two
colonial institutions, the civil service and the legislature, are the mechanisms
that help explain the subsequent over-representation of more educated dis-
tricts over less educated ones. The argument also provides two sub-hypothe-
ses that I present here and test below.
Ricart-Huguet
10 2555
First, I argue that civilian career paths in the colonial state are important
and underpin post-colonial governments. Many East and West African
countries endured military governments, usually as a result of successful
coups. These “military ministers” were not former members of civilian leg-
islatures or bureaucracies. Colonel Yeboah, a Ghanaian officer and later
cabinet member who contributed to depose President Nkrumah in 1966,
recounted that “in those days a career in the army was for someone who did
not have an education. It was not considered a very attractive career. It was
only for school drop-outs” (Baynham, 1994, p. 22). Others had never
attended school to begin with, such as Uganda’s Idi Amin (1971–1979).
While his early cabinets included some respected civilians (e.g., Apollo
Kironde, a teacher and lawyer), others had received next to no formal edu-
cation (e.g., Colonel and Foreign Minister Juma Oris). In brief, although
some coups were led by educated officers, others were “coups from below”
(Kandeh, 2004) carried out by subalterns who in turn placed loyal but uned-
ucated military men in the cabinet. Therefore, the importance of colonial
education should be larger under civilian governments than under military
governments (sub-hypothesis 1).
Second, the importance of colonial education should be greatest in the
early post-colonial period and diminish over time as human capital con-
straints lessen (sub-hypothesis 2). Patronage in the public sector has existed
at least since independence (Ekeh, 1975), when “recruitment to legislatures
often became one of the chief rewards for political fidelity” (Le Vine, 1968,
p. 386). I do not question the role of patronage in the composition of legisla-
tures or cabinets. Rather, I argue that a limited pool of qualified candidates
provides another important explanation to understand post-colonial cabinets
and that these constraints were especially important early in the post-colonial
period: “it is difficult to see where alternative educated candidates might
have been found to fill political offices” had civil servants not joined politics
(Ruth Morgenthau, quoted in Le Vine, 1968, p. 377). The education cam-
paigns of many African presidents keenly aware of its importance, such as
Nkrumah (Ghana) and Houphouet-Boigny (Cote d’Ivoire) in the 1960s, par-
tially reduced this shortcoming. By the 1990s, a still small but growing
minority of the population were highly educated and professionally experi-
enced, thus lessening early human capital constraints.
Colonial Education
The extent of colonial education in one’s home district was driven by both
systematic and haphazard factors. “Groups located near the colonial capital,
near a rail line or port, or near some center of colonial commerce—the sitting
2556
Ricart-Huguet Comparative Political Studies 54(14)
11
of which was usually determined by capricious factors, such as a harbor or a

natural resource to be exploited—were well situated to take up opportunities
as they arose” (Horowitz, 1985, p. 151). Convenient geography and proxim-
ity to pre-colonial trading posts facilitated early colonial infrastructure,
including schools (Wantchekon et al., 2015). Because education was not ran-
domly provided, all models account for these and other systematic factors,
such as natural resources and disease environment. Collectively, these factors
explain about 40% of the variation in colonial education across districts
(Supplemental Figure C9).
I outline four reasons why most of the variation in education is hard to
explain systematically: an ill-defined colonial investment strategy, a decen-
tralized colonial state, the diverse backgrounds and preferences of colonial
administrators (some civilians, other military men) combined with their
inability to choose the district where they wished to serve, and the sometimes
unplanned location of missions. These factors, well-known to historians, sug-
gest that differences in education levels across a colony’s districts, while not
random, were more haphazard than one might expect.
Uncoordinated Investments in a Decentralized Colonial State

The ‘command and control’ of [the British] empire was always ramshackle and
quite often chaotic. To suppose that an order uttered in London was obeyed
round the world by zealous proconsuls is an historical fantasy (although a
popular one).
Darwin (2012, p. xii)
European administrators lacked a systematic investment strategy because

tropical Africa ranked lowest in the priorities of the British and French
empires and because, until the late colonial period, their knowledge of the
territory was limited. District expenditures presumably responded to needs,
yet “no explicit investment strategy can be found in [French] local budgets.
Motivations reported at the beginning of each local budget explain the gen-
eral level of annual resources but do not motivate the spatial distribution of
public goods provision” (Huillery, 2009, p. 181). The equivalent British doc-
uments emanating from the Colonial Office (Constantine, 1984) present a
remarkably similar focus on administration rather than policy. “Colonial tax
and spending patterns did not follow a similar logic throughout British
Africa” (Frankema, 2011, p. 147) because “[Britain] did not strive to apply a
common financial policy to the various dependencies” beyond “general
instructions [. . .] from the Secretary of State for the Colonies” (Stammer,
1967, p. 194).
Ricart-Huguet
12 2557
Ill-defined investment strategies are less surprising if we realize that

colonies were decentralized and very much unlike Weberian states (Herbst,
2000). Short distances by today’s standards were long in the absence of
adequate roads and railroads, as was the case especially before World War
II. Limited knowledge of the territory as well as rudimentary communica-
tion hampered coordination between the core and the periphery of a colony
(Darwin, 2012, p. xii; Delavignette, 1968, p. 63). “Physical distances and
[lack] of communication” meant that the “administrative organization [in
French West Africa] was officially centralized but effectively decentral-
ized,” making district heads “the real chiefs of the French empire” (Huillery,
2009, p. 181; Delavignette, 1968).
Colonial administrators also provide some haphazard variation in public
investment allocations due to their varied backgrounds and their inability to
choose the district where they wished to serve. In British colonies, “candi-
dates [typically Oxford and Cambridge graduates] were allowed to name
three colonies where they would like to serve, although the Colonial Office
made it clear that there was no guarantee that they would be granted any of
them. [. . .] In the end it was where the vacancies were that governed the final
appointment” (Kirk-Greene, 2006, p. 38). French candidates could not choose
the district either. They could only rank the federations: French Indochina,
French West Africa, and French Equatorial Africa (that was the most com-
mon ranking because Indochina was the most developed federation and
Equatorial Africa the least developed). Further, the background of adminis-
trators was diverse, especially in the French case: some were recent graduates
of the École coloniale and other grandes écoles, but others were regular met-
ropolitan civil servants and even former soldiers (Cohen, 1973). District
heads with a background in elite schools, for example, might have devoted
more revenues to education than those with a military background, who
instead might have focused on law and order expenditures (e.g., police).
Finally, missions were central to education provision in British colo-
nies. On the one hand, missionary activity was usually higher in healthier
and more developed areas. On the other hand, missionaries sometimes
settled in remote locations despite having little information about the envi-
ronment, suggesting that mission location was as-if random in some
instances (Wantchekon et al., 2015). The colonial state subsidized some
missions (Lugard, 1922) but rarely interfered with their location, except in
some Muslim-majority areas. Overall, “the sitting of mission schools was
not a wholly unplanned process, but it was often the result of ethnically
random factors, such as the rivalries between Christian churches”
(Horowitz, 1985, p. 153).
2558
13
Figure 3. Birth years of ministers in pre-1990 and post-1990 cabinets.

The four Kernel densities show the distributions of birth years for ministers in 1960 to 1989
cabinets (left densities) and in the 1990 to 2010 cabinets (right densities).
Ministerial Biographies and Colonial Records

The list of cabinet members for every country in the sample since 1960
comes from yearly almanacs called Europa World Year Books. The sample
consists of the eight colonies of former French West Africa as well as the
main eight East and West territories under the British Colonial Office: Benin
(formerly Dahomey), Burkina Faso (Upper Volta), Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana
(Gold Coast), Guinea, Kenya, Malawi (Nyasaland), Mali (French Soudan),
Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania (Tanganyika),
Uganda, and Zambia (Northern Rhodesia). I combine the cabinet lists with
the World Biographical Information System (WBIS), which contains over
six million biographies worldwide, including those of many political leaders
(Supplemental Figure F1). I complement WBIS with other sources such as
the African Historical Dictionaries and Google Books.
The combination of the 16 country datasets result in 20,086 rows or min-
ister-years for the 1960 to 2010 period (Supplemental Table C3). As many as
66% of the ministers were adults by 1960 (born before 1942) and hence grew
up under colonial rule (henceforth “first generation ministers”) while the
remaining 33% were born after 1942 (second generation ministers). About
92% of ministers in 1960 to 1989 cabinets and 31% in 1990 to 2010 cabinets
are first-generation (Figure 3).9
Ricart-Huguet
14 2559
Figure 4. Birth locations of ministers in East and West Africa (1960–2010

average).
The maps show minister-shares by district. Minister-shares vary widely, from 0% in five
districts (e.g., Rufiji in Tanzania) to 32% in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) and 42% in Niamey
(Niger), an extreme outlier. Colonial Mauritania was composed of fewer districts than Mali or
any other colony, hence the percentage for any given district tends to be higher. All models
include fixed effects to account for this and other country-level fixed factors. Supplemental
Figures C3 to C6 present district minister-shares and the extent to which each district is
over- or under-represented by subtracting minister-shares from population shares.
I georeference the birth place of each minister and combine that informa-
tion with district-level colonial maps (Supplemental Figure F4) to determine
district of birth.10 In spite of administrative and political changes since inde-
pendence, 80% of colonial district boundaries remain as of 2015. Figure 4
presents the share of minister-years born in each district. In some countries,
ministers were born along the coast (Senegal) while others present no obvi-
ous patterns (Burkina Faso).
Colonial and pre-colonial data complement the biographies and histori-
cal maps. Colonial records (1910–1939) neatly overlap with first genera-
tion ministers, whose livelihoods were directly impacted by colonial
investments.11 I collect data on colonial investments at the district level by
combining records for French West Africa and the main eight African colo-
nies under the British Colonial Office. Huillery (2009) collected the origi-
nal French records, including the number of teachers, health staff, and
infrastructure expenditures per district for multiple years between 1910 and
1939. I collected British colonial records (Blue Books) in various libraries
in 1915, 1920, 1927, 1928, and 1938 as a function of availability and com-
pleteness (Supplemental Figure F3 shows a page of a Blue Book for Uganda
2560
15
and a page of a Compte Définitif for Benin). Records often contain detailed
information on demographics and infrastructure expenditures, among other
activities, but also have many gaps. As concerns colonial education, my
main measure is the number of public teachers in French districts, the main
providers of education in some colonies because the French restricted the
presence of missionaries in some areas (I am not aware of a comprehensive
data source that lists the number of missionaries across denominations for
French West Africa). For British districts, by contrast, I use the number of
Protestant missionaries in 1923 (Woodberry, 2012) because they were the
main education providers and because British colonial records sometimes
do not disaggregate education measures by district.
An important advantage of restricting the sample to East and West Africa
is the increased comparability within and between colonies. Record-keeping
procedures were similar because all colonies in the sample reported equiva-
lent data to the Colonial Office or the Ministère des Colonies. This compara-
bility does not easily extend to colonies under the control of the Foreign
Office, such as Sudan. Appendix F provides information on historical data
sources for geographic, geologic, pre-colonial and socioeconomic covariates
that could potentially affect investment decisions and confound the effect of
colonial education.
Results
I begin by estimating the effect of colonial education on district minister-
shares. The baseline specification is a log-log model that explains within-
country variation in minister-shares as a function of educational investments
and other covariates:
Yik = β0 + β1educationik + other investmentsT β2 + X T β3 + ηk + εik (1)
where outcome Y is the logged percentage of minister-years born in dis-

trict i and country k. Y and education are logged to reduce right-skew.12
β1 is the coefficient of interest, which corresponds to public teachers in
French colonies, missionaries in British colonies, and the combination of the
two when all colonies are considered together. Models include infrastructure
and health, the two other main investments in each empires, because they
could confound the effect of education. The set of pre-colonial and colonial
controls (X ) is listed under Table 1. All models include country fixed effects
( η ) to examine the distribution of power within each country.13
The results (Table 1) are interesting in three respects. First, colonial edu-
cation matters in both empires but other investments do not.14 Spending more
Ricart-Huguet
16 2561
on buildings, roads, sewage, and electricity—the four components of infra-

structure investments in each empire—may foster development, but it does
not increase the share of ministers from that district. Public health staff—the
number of doctors and nurses—does not have a consistently positive effect
either. The main coefficient, β1 , can be interpreted as an elasticity because
these are log-log models: on average, a 1% increase in the number of mis-
sionaries (teachers) in a British (French) district leads to a 0.14% (0.65%)
increase in the percentage of ministers hailing from that district. Put differ-
ently, an increase from the 25th to the 75th percentile in education means that
minister-shares for the average district increase from 3.6% to 5.2%, nearly a
50% increase. Finally, the long set of district-level controls collectively
explain about 9% of the variation in district minister-shares while education
alone explains about 4% (i.e., R 2 increases by 4%).
Second, the political effect of education is type-specific: it derives from
public education (teachers) in French colonies and from private education
(missionaries) in British colonies, consistent with the type of education that
dominated in each empire. By contrast, the effect of private education (i.e.,
missions) in French colonies and public education (i.e., government schools)
in British colonies is also positive but small and insignificant (Supplemental
Table C4).15 Third, β1 > 1 would suggest that districts benefit from some
critical mass of teachers to take-off politically (increasing marginal returns).
Instead, 0 < β1 < 1 indicates that going from one to two teachers is more
important than going from nine to ten (diminishing marginal returns).
Beyond average effects, I examine whether the importance of education
is heterogeneous. Indeed, Table 1 shows that the effect is larger in French
than in British districts. The smaller effect in British districts could result
from the regional balancing efforts in British colonies during the indepen-
dence transitions. These balancing efforts were a last-minute attempt to
foster stability by politically compensating regions left behind in terms of
their education and development, as discussed earlier in the case of Northern
Nigeria. However, this difference could also result from a number of other
differences between the two empires, measurement issues, or from the fact
teachers focused on teaching while missionaries also spent time proselyting
and providing health care.
I focus instead on the two sub-hypotheses presented in section 3. To test
whether the education effect is larger under civilian than military govern-
ments (sub-hypothesis 1), I code each country-year as having either a civil or
a military government. All 16 countries except for Kenya, Senegal, Tanzania,
and Zambia endure some military rule between 1960 and 2010. Overall, 41%
of the 816 country-years (16*51 ) have military governments.16 Y becomes
the share of ministers from district i under either civilian rule or military rule
Table 1. Minister-Shares by District (1960–2010 Average).
2562
All colonies British colonies French colonies
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
Educational colonial investments

Missionaries (1923)/public teachers (pre-1940), logged 0.23** 0.19**
(0.03) (0.04)
Missionaries (1923), logged 0.17** 0.14**
(0.03) (0.04)
Public teachers (pre-1940), logged 0.65** 0.65**
(0.08) (0.18)
Other colonial investments
Infrastructure expenditures (pre-1940), logged −0.00 −0.01 0.02
(0.01) (0.01) (0.02)
Colonial railroad indicator −0.05 −0.17* 0.23†
(0.08) (0.09) (0.14)
Public health staff (pre-1940), logged 0.08* 0.06 −0.03
(0.03) (0.04) (0.11)
Population, logged (1960–2010) 0.44** 0.44** 0.42** 0.44** 0.36** 0.42**
(0.04) (0.05) (0.05) (0.06) (0.05) (0.09)
Country fixed effects (FE) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Geographic controls No Yes No Yes No Yes
Pre-colonial ethnic and socioeconomic controls No Yes No Yes No Yes
Districts (N) 311 311 199 199 112 112
Adj. R 2 0.59 0.58 0.56 0.58 0.64 0.65
†
p < 0.10 , * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01.
Robust standard errors in parentheses. Models include a rich set of district-level variables that may affect education: geographic controls (distance from the coast,
an indicator for navigable rivers, an indicator for natural harbors or capes, a continuous measure of terrain ruggedness, malaria and tse-tse fly indices to proxy for
disease environment, noble and base metals indicators, and a soil quality index), population and area controls, and pre-colonial socioeconomic controls (ethnolinguistic
fractionalization, prevalence of Islam and of slavery, agricultural development, settlement patterns, and political centralization). Unsurprisingly, controlling for the pre-
17
1940 population instead strengthens my results because cabinet shares are better explained by current than by past population. Hence, all models control for 1960 to
2010 population, a more stringent test, at the risk of introducing some post-treatment bias.
Ricart-Huguet
18 2563
Figure 5. Effect of education on district minister-shares by decade and type of

government.
Districts are the unit of analysis. Models include the same controls as in Table 1. The “All
governments” coefficient can be larger than the other two because the figure presents 15
separate models. We can think of early 1960s civilian governments as the upper-bound of the
colonial education effect and of zero as the lower-bound.
after grouping military and civilian years separately. To test whether the
effect is larger in earlier than later decades (sub-hypothesis 2), I calculate
district minister-shares for each decade and rerun the main model (equation
1) for each decade. I also run this decadal model for civilian and military
governments separately.
Regarding sub-hypothesis 1, Figure 5 shows that colonial education
increases district minister-shares for all decades for civilian governments.
However, for military governments, the effect is always smaller and even
insignificant in four of five decades. As discussed, Africa experienced “coups
from below” (Kandeh, 2004) led by uneducated officers that were unlike the
Sandhurst-trained Indian military elite (Wilkinson, 2015). Biographical
records show that some ministers under military governments were educated,
even at Makerere, Oxbridge, the École William Ponty, or Paris, but many
others received little schooling. Further, cabinet-level patronage is arguably
more pervasive in military governments.
Regarding sub-hypothesis 2, Figure 5 shows that the effect of education is
larger in the 1960 to 1989 period than in the 1990 to 2010 period—whether
we consider all governments or only civilian governments. This is consistent
with the more direct impact of colonial education on earlier decades where
almost all ministers were first-generation ministers and with the idea that
human capital constraints were more pressing early on. It is also in line with
2564
19
the idea that Africa’s wave of democratization in the 1990s made cabinets
more representative, which diminished the early political advantage of more
educated districts.17 These explanations for the smaller effect of education
after 1990 notwithstanding, section 6.3 discusses why colonial education
continues to increase political representation even post-1990 in spite of the
political instability and turmoil that many East and West African countries
experienced since the 1970s.
Alternative Explanations
Education could be proxying for European settlers, state capacity, or pre-
colonial characteristics. I examine these three alternative explanations in
turn. Settlers influenced investments and hence could be biasing the effect of
education (Gardner, 2012, p. 98), but I find that European population is insig-
nificant and does not alter the education point estimate, which remains 0.19
(Supplemental Table C7).
State capacity, proxied by levels of institutional and fiscal development,
could also be confounding the effect of education. As Lugard (1922, p. 232)
put it, “the payment of direct taxes is in Africa, as elsewhere, an unwelcome
concomitant of progress.” This is likely the case in French West Africa
where, more so than in British Africa, the colonial state engaged not just in
taxation but also in education provision. However, institutional and fiscal
development do not reduce the effect of education in French districts
(Supplemental Table C7). If anything, the correlation between the number
of administrators serving in a district, a proxy for local institutional devel-
opment, and minister-shares is negative once we account for confounders
such as colonial education.
A third set of plausible alternatives concerns pre-colonial characteristics
of the ethnic groups in those districts. Ethnic diversity and fragmentation are
inimical for growth and public goods provision (Easterly & Levine, 1997;
Habyarimana et al., 2007). Recent literature provides evidence that ethnic
groups with higher pre-colonial political centralization, namely kingdoms,
provide better public services and are more developed today (Bandyopadhyay
& Green, 2016). Hence, my findings may be explained by the over-represen-
tation of districts that were more ethnically homogeneous or more politically
centralized pre-colonially. I find no evidence in either direction and the edu-
cation coefficient remains unchanged (Supplemental Table C8).
Finally, I examine plausible determinants of colonial education. The pres-
ence of a pre-colonial trading post in the district increases colonial education
and distance from trading posts decreases it (Supplemental Table C9). This is
Ricart-Huguet
20 2565
consistent with evidence that colonial investments in coastal colonies were

concentrated around pre-colonial trading posts (Ricart-Huguet, 2021). Once
we account for pre-colonial trade, other geographic explanations such as dis-
tance from the coast, terrain ruggedness, disease environment (Alsan, 2015),
natural resources (Curtin et al., 1995), and various pre-colonial characteris-
tics are largely irrelevant. As Table 1 showed, these controls reduce the mag-
nitude but not the significance of the education coefficient.
The careful consideration of alternative explanations is important.
However, alternative explanations do not eliminate endogeneity. While
reverse causality is ruled out by design, omitted variable bias is a possible
source of endogeneity and remains a concern. I employ two methods, regional
fixed effects and Oster bounds, to reduce this concern. I also use a new
machine learning method to reduce model dependence and bias from model
misspecification. Because of space limitations, I present and discuss these
three methods in more detail in Appendix B. The addition of regional fixed
effects to the main models shows that the political effect of education remains
even if we limit the comparison to more similar and often neighboring dis-
tricts within each colony. The sensitivity analysis, following Oster (2019),
shows that the importance of unobserved variables would have to be unreal-
istically large (given that the model already explains a majority of the varia-
tion) for the effect of education to disappear. Finally, the machine learning
method by Ratkovic and Tingley (2017) is akin in spirit to a matching method
but allows for continuous “treatments” (such as colonial education). It also
minimizes bias from model misspecification, a common problem of match-
ing methods, and model dependence because it is non-parametric.
Two Colonial Institutions as Mechanisms of Persistence

I leverage the ministerial biographies to provide evidence that the career
development of many ministers involved the colonial civil service or the
colonial legislature.18 Most data come from first-generation ministers who
served before the 1980s, many of whom have more detailed biographies
than second-generation ministers because of their historical prominence. I
find that over 75% were colonial civil servants, appointed or elected mem-
bers of colonial legislatures, or both (Figure 6). Only around 10% were
members of the colonial army. These percentages quantify the importance
attributed to these two colonial institutions as a cradle of the educated
class (Le Vine, 1968; Mazrui, 1978): they reveal that it was almost neces-
sary to join one of these two institutions in order to become a minister in
the early post-colonial period. The biographies help illustrate the argu-
ment’s mechanism at the individual level. Diamballa Maiga, the son of a
Songhai district chief, was Niger’s Minister of Interior throughout the
2566
21
Figure 6. Cabinet members in the colonial civil service, legislature, and army.
A simple t-test shows that mean differences in percentages between empires are not
significant. Data collection for these three variables is limited to first-generation ministers.
Figure 6. (continued)
Ricart-Huguet
22 2567
Figure 6. (continued)
The missingness rate for these three variables is 20% for ministers that served in the 1960s
(many of whom continued to serve in the 1970s). Missing data usually concern short-lived
ministers and ministers of state. Thus, while data are not missing at random, the dataset
captures nearly all actual ministers (that is, not ministers of state) and members of military
juntas (in the case of military executives) who served for two or more years. Naturally,
the percentages reported in the graphs would be lower for the younger second-generation
ministers.
1960s. Born in 1910, he was an “unwilling pupil and was actually forced
to school by the police.” Nonetheless, “he flourished in school [and even-
tually became] a clerk in the Finance Department from 1929 to 1940”
(WBIS, 2014). Senegalese Ousmane Camara, by contrast, came from an
underprivileged and unstructured family. Nonetheless, he explains that “a
bookish bulimia [boulimie livresque] with my friend Birane Wane [. . .]
led us to devour all of what the municipal library of Kaolack contained”
(Camara, 2010, p. 28). He eventually attended the Lycée Faidherbe and
later became one of the first four judges of Senegal and Minister of Civil
Services and Labor. These two examples are colorful in their details but
typical in their essence.
The relevance of the civil service and the legislature as sources of highly
qualified candidates for ministerial posts did not cease at independence.
Many second-generation ministers in 1990 to 2010 cabinets joined these
institutions after independence. The civil service remained the breeding
ground for educated elites at least until the late 1980s, when public sector
wages declined (van de Walle, 2001). At the same time, human capital con-
straints lessened, especially in large countries like Nigeria, but were not elim-
inated. Tertiary education remained rare and, although many presidents such
as Nkrumah, Houphouët-Boigny, Nyerere, and others extended primary edu-
cation, more educated districts during colonial rule remain more educated in
2011 (Figure 7). In brief, besides the patronage considerations I discuss next,
leaders are constrained by the need to compose able cabinets or risk facing a
shorter tenure (Arriola, 2009). This is one reason why even the cabinets of
Colonel Idi Amin Dada (1971–1979) in Uganda included some capable aca-
demics and lawyers hailing from the civil service, the legislature, and previ-
ous civilian cabinets.
Post-Colonial Persistence: Patronage and Networks

This article does not question that regional favoritism via patronage has
affected the composition of post-colonial legislatures and cabinets (Arriola &
2568
23
Figure 7. Colonial education predicts post-colonial educational achievement.

The graph shows positive correlations between colonial education and current educational
achievement across districts. Data on current education come from Afrobarometer (2011)
surveys, where zero equals no formal schooling and six equals post-secondary education).
Average educational achievement is higher in former British colonies, while the correlation is
stronger in former French colonies (ρ = 0.45 vs ρ = 0.33).
Johnson, 2014; Le Vine, 1968). In fact, the results below suggest that patron-
age is one reason why the effect of colonial education persists. Rather, I high-
light that patronage-centered explanations (i) beg the question of why
education was important to begin with, something that my argument eluci-
dates, (ii) cannot explain why heads of government were born in more edu-
cated districts, and (iii) cannot fully account for the continued importance of
colonial education.19 I create an indicator that equals one in the 74 districts
where one or more heads of government (president in presidential systems,
prime minister in parliamentary systems) were born. I use this indicator as an
outcome to show the importance of colonial education even if we limit the
sample to heads of governments (Table 2).
I then use this indicator as a covariate to proxy for district/regional favorit-
ism. On the one hand, the indicator explains part of the education effect,
consistent with favoritism being one mechanism of persistence (Supplemental
Tables C11 and C12). This seems to be driven by former British colonies and
by models where the indicator includes all heads of government, that is, mili-
tary and civilian. Relatively, then, favoritism is lower in former French than
Ricart-Huguet
24 2569
Table 2. Do Heads of Government (1960–2010) Hail from More Educated

Districts?
All British French

colonies colonies colonies
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

†
Teachers/missionaries 0.07* 0.09* 0.07 0.08* 0.41* 0.40*
(pre-1940), logged
(0.03) (0.04) (0.03) (0.04) (0.16) (0.19)
Population, logged (1960–2010) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Geographic controls Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Pre-colonial ethnic and Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
socioeconomic controls
Other colonial investments Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Country fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Region fixed effects No Yes No Yes No Yes
Districts (N) 311 311 199 199 112 112
R2 0.23 0.32 0.22 0.33 0.38 0.52
Adj. R2 0.13 0.09 0.10 0.07 0.17 0.20
†
p < 0.10, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01.
Robust standard errors in parentheses. The table presents six linear probability models
showing that districts with one or more post-colonial heads of government (presidents or
prime ministers) received more education during the colonial period.
British colonies and in civilian than military governments. On the other hand,
the indicator only accounts for about 25% of the overall effect of colonial
education. This is consistent with the argument that considerations other than
patronage, such as human capital, can also be important (Brierley, 2020).
Whatever the considerations may be in each particular case, ministers are
not selected in a vacuum—they are often part a political network, a term
imbued with a negative connotation when discussed in the context of patron-
age. It is hardly controversial that political networks are important to under-
stand cabinet formation. Rather, I suggest that the networks of post-colonial
leaders like Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana or Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Côte
d’Ivoire were not simply patronage networks but also “human capital net-
works,” allowing them to appoint ministers with regards to patronage but
also with regards to human capital. Their early networks comprised most
among the limited pool of highly qualified candidates. Many in Nkrumah’s
“government of teachers” were both members of his network and highly edu-
cated public employees (Coe, 2005, p. 63).20
2570
25
Networks seem especially relevant for second-generation elites, who often

attended the same schools as their first-generation counterparts (e.g., Achimota
College in Ghana, the École William Ponty in Senegal) and thus benefited
from connections that were not generally available to ministers educated
under colonial rule. Further, the quality of colonial-era schools, including
those that had become elite cradles, decreased after 1960. These two consider-
ations suggest that network connections are an important mechanism to
explain why second-generation ministers also hail from districts with higher
levels of colonial education, perhaps more than colonial education per se.
Gonja district in Northern Ghana illustrates how human capital and net-
works go hand in hand to explain first and second-generation political elite
formation. Although Gonja district was less educated than most districts in
colonial Ghana and has been under-represented since independence
(Supplemental Figure C3), recent President John Mahama was born there. A
British district officer in the 1930s forced his father, Emmanuel Mahama, to
attend a boarding school against his family’s will. The officer selected his
father among a group of children because of his “protruding navel,” an act of
chance that determined “the fate of my entire family” (Mahama, 2012, p.
24–27). Emmanuel Mahama became a successful teacher, MP in Nkrumah’s
party, and finally Minister under Nkrumah. He became an aspirational role
model for a group of educated second-generation Gonja politicians, including
his son.21 For his part, Nkrumah was educated at a Catholic mission and
developed his network during his time as a teacher and pro-independence
politician. These examples also illustrate why short-term explanations of
cabinet formation are incomplete: networks matter but are endogenous to the
early inequality in education that shaped these very networks.
Political Elites and Current Development

Existing literature on colonial legacies provides evidence that inequality in
factor endowments and investments explains unequal contemporary develop-
ment (e.g., Engerman & Sokoloff, 2012; Huillery, 2009). Much of this litera-
ture minimizes the role of political elites in explaining why inequality
persists. Political elites are particularly well-placed to maintain or even
increase colonial-era inequalities so long as they continue to hail from dis-
tricts that were already ahead during colonialism, which they do. Minister-
shares by district in the 1960s and the 2000s are correlated ( ρ = 0.46 ).
Table 3 shows that colonial education predicts educational achievement
and economic development, as proxied by contemporary nightlight intensity
(e.g., Weidmann & Schutte, 2017), even after controlling for a large set of
covariates including regional fixed effects. More interestingly, I show that,
26
Table 3. Contemporary Economic Development and Educational Achievement by District.
Ricart-Huguet
Nightlights (1992–2012) Education (2010–2015)
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

** † ** **
Teachers/missionaries (pre-1940), logged 1.99 0.89 1.28 0.14 0.12 0.08**
(0.74) (0.57) (0.72) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02)
Population mean (1960–2010), logged 8.89** 0.26**
(1.11) (0.03)
Minister-years share mean (1960–2010), logged 3.55** 0.30**
(0.99) (0.02)
Population (pre-1940), logged Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Geographic controls Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Pre-colonial ethnic and socioeconomic controls Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Other colonial investments Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Country fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Region fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Districts/respondents (N) 311 311 311 49815 49815 49815
Adj. R2 0.80 0.86 0.81 0.22 0.23 0.23
The first outcome is logged nightlights in a district averaged between 1992 and 2012. The second is current educational achievement data from
rounds 5 and 6 of the Afrobarometer. The models include all controls listed in Table 1. Minister-shares are logged to reduce the weight of outliers
(the coefficient is larger when it is not logged).
†
p < 0.10, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01.
2571
2572
27
beyond population shifts (e.g., internal migration), district minister-shares

explain part of the effect of colonial education on both outcomes. For night-
lights, district population explains 55% or (1.99–0.89)/1.99 of the colonial
education effect, while district minister-shares explain 36%. For current edu-
cational achievement, district population explains 14% of the colonial educa-
tion effect while district minister-shares explain 42%. Consistent with much
of the distributive politics literature, I find that changes in nightlight intensity
between 1992 and 2012 are driven by 1990 to 2010 ministers, who tend to
favor their home district (Supplemental Figure C1).
Overall, these results suggest two important takeaways. First, both popu-
lation shares and minister shares are important mechanisms. The importance
of population hints at the importance of (electoral) accountability in these
former colonies, some of which are semi-democratic regimes since the 1990s.
Second, and less hopefully, ministers seem to be reproducing rather than
reducing the regional disparities inherited from the colonial period.
Conclusion
Government formation is widely considered to be a short-term and strategic
process. This article expands our understanding of how governments emerge
by providing instead a long-term explanation that leverages the historical
process of political elite formation in Africa. Regional favoritism and patron-
age in the cabinet matter and existing work has examined them at length, but
they ignore the possible structural determinants that favored a particular
regional distribution of power. This historical approach is also motivated by
the persistent political inequality that my data reveal: over-represented dis-
tricts in the 1960s (i.e., districts whose share of ministers is higher than their
population share) remain over-represented even after the 1990s democratiza-
tion wave in Africa.
In this article, I show that this persistent regional political inequality is
rooted in the pre-independence period. It is the result of unequal education
during colonialism rather than of other uneven colonial investments, eco-
nomic development, or pre-colonial ethnic characteristics. Some districts are
more represented than others in post-colonial governments because they
received higher colonial investments in primary education and because
Europeans’ recruitment strategy into the colonial state selected on literacy but
disregarded regional balancing. The civil service and the legislature became
cradles of political elites and hence are key mechanisms to understand why
colonial education explains who governs today.
My explanation departs from recent research on colonialism arguing that
indirect rule explains which ethnic groups are politically represented in
Ricart-Huguet
28 2573
post-colonial governments (McAlexander, 2020; Wucherpfennig et al.,

2016). The institution of (in)direct rule was often determined at the colony or
region level. For example, Northern Nigeria was ruled indirectly and the
South directly. Instead of institutions, I emphasize the promise of district-
level investments (while holding regional-level institutions constant) to
understand elite formation, political representation, and ultimately
development.
More broadly, we know that colonial legacies matter for present-day
socioeconomic outcomes but we have only begun to understand why. I argue
that political elites are an important reason why districts with higher invest-
ments then are more developed today. In contexts with weak institutions and
low accountability, political elites may reproduce rather than reduce regional
inequality.
Does the argument extend beyond East and West Africa? It should extend
to former colonies countries where local recruitment into colonial institutions
was prevalent and political elites were the most educated segment of society,
as was the case in many colonies (Putnam, 1976). Most-similar countries
include those of former French Equatorial Africa (Cameroon, the Central
African Republic, Chad, Gabon, and the Republic of Congo) and other British
colonies such as Sudan or Gambia. Boone (1992, p. 20) noted that Africa was
distinctive from other continents because the post-colonial ruling class was
not a part of the “indigenous capitalist class.” Yet, my argument may extend
to parts of South Asia and of the Middle East, where colonialism also trans-
formed the social structure and the effendiyya (educated men) gained politi-
cal prominence in some colonies (Hartnett, 2019). By contrast, the argument
seems less relevant for settler colonies. European settlers ruled after indepen-
dence (e.g., South Africa) in some colonies and colonization brought large-
scale death to native populations in others (e.g., Central America). In most of
Latin America, criollo settlers like Simón Bolívar rather than the indigenous
population ruled after independence. Upcoming research will explore the
causes of regional political inequality in some of these settings.
I conclude by briefly reflecting on underappreciated political conse-
quences of education policy. In the decades following independence, many
post-colonial governments (e.g., Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Tanzania, etc.) and
policy-makers in international organizations (e.g., World Bank) emphasized
extending primary education. In their pursuit to increase literacy rates, how-
ever, they often overlooked a key efficiency versus equity trade-off: increas-
ing primary education in core districts was easier and cheaper because
infrastructure was already in place, but it perpetuated political as well as
socioeconomic regional inequality a generation later. The flipside of this
observation is that, although perfect regional political equality may not be
2574
29
feasible or desirable, a more regionally-balanced provision of education may

reduce the political exclusion of regions and groups that have been sidelined
from power since independence.
Acknowledgments
For useful comments, I thank Carles Boix, Marc Ratkovic, Leonard Wantchekon, and
Jennifer Widner as well as Kate Baldwin, Torben Behmer, Volha Charnysh, Denis
Cogneau, Ana de la O, Romain Ferrali, Adriane Fresh, Allison Hartnett, Phil Keefer,
Ian Lustick, Felix Meier Zu Selhausen, Gautam Nair, Agustina Paglayan, Betsy Levy
Paluck, Evan Lieberman, Brandon Miller de la Cuesta, Jeff Paller, Chris Parel, Tim
Parsons, Costantino Pischedda, Rajesh Ranganath, Ron Rogowski, Tsering Wangyal
Shawa, Emily Sellars, Robert Tignor, Stephanie Weber, Martha Wilfhart, Oscar
Torres-Reyna, and three anonymous reviewers. I also thank seminar participants at
the Aage Sorensen Memorial Conference, the Annual Meeting of the American
Political Science Association, the Berlin Social Science Research Center (WZB), the
Historical Political Economy working group, the Institute of Economic History at
Humboldt University, Princeton University, UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania,
the Yale African History Working Group, the Yale University Comparative Politics
Workshop, the Working Group in African Political Economy at NYU-Abu Dhabi,
and the World Economic History Congress. I am grateful to Elise Huillery and Bob
Woodberry for sharing relevant data. Jeremy Darrington helped me locate multiple
data sources. Hassan Saad, as well as Karen Gallagher-Teske, Sahshe Gerard, Sarah
Malik, Edwin Mayoki, Seth Merkin Morokoff, Natalya Rahman, Diana Sandoval
Siman, Bruno Schaffa, and Lulu Zhong provided excellent research assistance.
Replication materials can be found at Ricart-Huguet (2020).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article: Financial support from the Mamdouha
Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, the Princeton Institute for International and
Regional Studies, the Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale is gratefully
acknowledged.
ORCID iD
Joan Ricart-Huguet https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4553-9563
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
Ricart-Huguet
30 2575
Notes
1. Throughout this article, “district” refers to the actual administrative units that
constitute my unit of analysis while region is used generically. Cabinet ministers
refers to the specific individuals studied while political elites is used generically.
2. The patterns are similar for all other countries in the sample (Supplemental
Figures C3–C6).
3. Notable exceptions include Wilkinson (2015) and Wucherpfennig et al. (2016).
4. See Golden and Min (2013) and Kramon and Posner (2013) for worldwide and
Africa-specific literature reviews.
5. Legislative malapportionment is the deviation from this population criterion.
6. This is not always the case today because most former British colonies have
become presidential republics.
7. Only in 1956 did French law (loi-cadre Defferre) institute universal suffrage for
French colonial subjects. The process was less uniform but also slow in British
colonies.
8. As many as 91% of ministers in 1960 to 1989 cabinets and even 31% in 1990 to
2010 cabinets were 18 or older by 1960 (section 5).
9. Year 1990 is a logical split because it marks the end of the Cold War and the
beginning of the democratization wave in Africa (Lindberg, 2006; van de Walle,
2001).
10. Birthplace location is available for 80% of the 20,086 minister-years. Missing
birth places usually concern short-lived ministers and ministers of state.
11. Records are scant before the 1900s and less systematic after 1945. This split also
separates those born the interwar period (1910s–1939) from the developmental
phase of colonialism (1945–1960) (Boone, 1992; Lawrence, 2013).
12. The effect of education is usually larger in models without logs. Note that cabi-
net shares by districts are not independently distributed, they are an example of
compositional data. Models in Appendix A use log-ratio transformations of the
dependent variable to overcome that issue.
13. While cross-sectional models cannot include time fixed-effects by definition, I
examine temporal variation below by testing whether the effect of education var-
ies by decade.
14. The education effect is robust to excluding colonial capitals (Supplemental Table
C5) and one country at a time as well as to limiting the sample to the subset of
districts without colonial education (Supplemental Table C6).
15. Of course, this does not mean that teachers (missionaries) did not matter in
British (French) districts. It only means that, probably because there were rela-
tively fewer of them, the effect is smaller and thus we cannot reject the null
hypothesis.
16. I code each country-year as civilian or military based on whether the head of
government is a civilian or a member of the military. For example, Ghana under
John Rawlings is coded as a military government until 1992 but as a civilian gov-
ernment during his 1993 to 2000 civilian tenure. Mauritania is coded as military
for 1979 to 2008 but as civilian for 2009 to 2010.
2576
31
17. Finally, the smaller education effect in the 1990 to 2010 period is also consistent
with the fact that education programs right after independence in Ghana, Cote
d’Ivoire, and other countries made education less exclusive, although it is worth
restating that, even among 1990 to 2010 ministers, one third were adults before
1960.
18. A dataset of all pre-1960 civil servants and legislators and their birthplaces
would be ideal to show that districts with more education were more represented
in those institutions, thereby directly testing the mechanisms. To my knowledge,
such data do not exist.
19. Regarding (ii), patronage is of little help because heads of government are rarely
appointed and usually elected even in semi-democratic regimes.
20. Camp (2002) has documented similar network patterns for Mexican elites in
great detail.
21. Wantchekon et al. (2015) provide systematic evidence for a similar intergenera-
tional account in Benin.
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Author Biography
Joan Ricart-Huguet is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science
at Loyola University Maryland. His recent research has appeared in the British
Journal of Political Science and Studies in Comparative International Development.
He holds a PhD from Princeton University.

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minister share minister share - population share

minister share minister share - population share

Figure 1. Minister-shares by district of birth (1960–2010 average).

distribution would be uniform (the left graphs would be flat) or proportional

In lieu of short-term strategic explanations, I offer a deeper historical

To alleviate endogeneity concerns, I account for historical factors that

The Importance of Cabinets in African Politics

Cabinet ministers are important to understand political representation, the dis-

Beyond Strategic Cabinet Formation: The Colonial

(1967–1970). Post-independence political conflict lay not only in regionally

Colonial Institutions as Mechanisms of Regional Political

Figure 2. The political consequences of unequal education provision across

power-sharing arrangements at independence. The early 1960s were momen-

of which was usually determined by capricious factors, such as a harbor or a

Uncoordinated Investments in a Decentralized Colonial State

European administrators lacked a systematic investment strategy because

Ill-defined investment strategies are less surprising if we realize that

Figure 3. Birth years of ministers in pre-1990 and post-1990 cabinets.

Ministerial Biographies and Colonial Records

Figure 4. Birth locations of ministers in East and West Africa (1960–2010

Yik = β0 + β1educationik + other investmentsT β2 + X T β3 + ηk + εik (1)

where outcome Y is the logged percentage of minister-years born in dis-

on buildings, roads, sewage, and electricity—the four components of infra-

All colonies British colonies French colonies

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Educational colonial investments

Figure 5. Effect of education on district minister-shares by decade and type of

consistent with evidence that colonial investments in coastal colonies were

Two Colonial Institutions as Mechanisms of Persistence

Post-Colonial Persistence: Patronage and Networks

Figure 7. Colonial education predicts post-colonial educational achievement.

Table 2. Do Heads of Government (1960–2010) Hail from More Educated

All British French

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Networks seem especially relevant for second-generation elites, who often

Political Elites and Current Development

Nightlights (1992–2012) Education (2010–2015)

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

beyond population shifts (e.g., internal migration), district minister-shares

post-colonial governments (McAlexander, 2020; Wucherpfennig et al.,

feasible or desirable, a more regionally-balanced provision of education may

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Brierley, S. (2020). Combining patronage and merit in public sector recruitment.

Lawrence, A. K. (2013). Imperial rule and the politics of nationalism. Cambridge

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