Chapter 1 articulates the theory of institutional congruence. I argue that persistent forms of social cooperation at the grassroots are revitalized following institutional reform because some communities have inherited robust social institutions that stipulate appropriate social behavior. I elaborate on the theory’s dual mechanisms of shared social identification and dense cross-village network ties to illustrate how institutional congruence helps local elites navigate the two-level political game introduced by decentralization: local elected officials face pressure within their villages on a first level that are not always compatible with their incentives at the second level of the local state itself, where they must negotiate with other elites from other villages. When shared social institutions stretch across the many villages of a local government, elites find it easier to negotiate at the second level of the local state because these social institutions reorient them toward group-based goals. As a consequence, local representation and redistribution is expected to be broader across space under conditions of high congruence, but contentious and targeted when it is low.

This chapter employs an original, geocoded dataset of social service investments to estimate the effect of precolonial centralization on a village's likelihood of receiving a new local public good between 2002 and 2012. I find robust evidence that falling within the territory of a precolonial state increases a village’s chance of receiving local infrastructural investments from the local state. This result is robust to a number of alternative explanations and model specifications, affirming the argument that there is something different about how local governments respond to demands for and deliver these public goods in formerly centralized areas even when accounting for similar objective need. The chapter thus documents that we are witnessing the emergence of subnational variation in the spatial logics of local public goods delivery.

The final chapter concludes by summarizing the book’s core argument before offering reflections on the implications my findings hold for ongoing decentralization reforms and the study of historical legacies.

This chapter presents the results of an original survey of more than 350 local elites sampled from across Senegal’s precolonial geography to develop insights into how local actors experience and evaluate their local governments. Throughout their answers to open-ended questions, respondents invoke the past when describing local sociopolitical cleavages. Cumulatively, their responses illustrate how cross-village social institutions motivate local political action under decentralization in historically centralized areas. Where cross-village social institutions are absent, local politics are more frequently described as contentious and conflictual. I use this survey data to elaborate the foundations of my theory and to deduce the theory’s two mechanisms: the role of group identities and social network ties. Both mechanisms are present and mutually reinforcing in areas that were home to precolonial kingdoms, while they are fragmented across space in historically acephalous zones. The findings show that otherwise similar local governments are home to distinct political climates as a function of their long-run political histories.

In the final empirical chapter, I push beyond Senegal to look broadly across West Africa to assess the generalizability of my findings. Senegal is not the only West African state to display remarkable subnational variation in exposure to precolonial statehood nor to have recently undertaken decentralization reforms. I extend my coding of precolonial kingdoms to the subregion and match it to data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Afrobarometer public opinion surveys to test the theory's generalizability. I find that areas of West Africa that were exposed to precolonial states have seen bigger gains in locally delivered public goods and that Afrobarometer respondents in these areas are more positive about their local governments and democratic practice than their counterparts in historically acephalous zones. While my theory is built around the specific legacies of precolonial statehood, the chapter's second half move beyond Africa to show the broader analytic leverage of the theory’s twin mechanisms of shared social identification and social network ties for Comparative Politics. The chapter concludes with a discussion of scope conditions for the argument.

This chapter deploys model-testing case studies to explore the theoretical mechanisms laid out in Chapter 1. I follow a "typical" or on-lier case selection strategy from the statistical analysis by selecting cases that are similar in as many respects as possible apart from their exposure to a precolonial polity. By pairing oral histories, in-depth interviews, and network analysis of local elite social ties, I trace how the presence of a shared social identity and dense networks shape redistributive preferences in a "typical" case of institutional congruence, while their absence generates more biased forms of redistribution elsewhere. A third case utilizes the example of a precolonial kingdom that collapsed prior to French colonization leading to the out-migration of the kingdom's population. This reinforces the necessity of the theory's mechanism of persistence – durable rural social hierarchies – to carry precolonial legacies into the calculus of local elites today.

In approximately three decades since South Africa’s democratic transition, the country is still battling with many challenges, the most evident being food insecurity. While the state has framed a plethora of legislations as a response, the setback persists. The key underlying factors may be linked to poor policy alignment, institutional challenges and lack of political will on the part of government. This chapter argues that overcoming prevalent hunger requires proactive measures aimed at forging an overarching Food Security Act which sets out binding provisions for the provision of staple food for pregnant women, poor households and unemployed youths as a means of sustenance. The Act must further oblige the state to absorb the ‘missing middle’ into social welfare programme while providing adequate start-up capital, skills and capacity development as a means of helping some to be self-sustaining. Yet, in light of the lack of political appetite on the part of the state to dispense resources for public good, there is a need for political players to act as a check on each other, whereas the informal policy players must influence their formal counterparts to act.