Research

Democratic governments sometimes use violence against their people, yet little is known about the electoral consequences of these events. Studying South Africa’s Marikana massacre, we document how a new opposition party formed as a direct result of violence, quantify significant electoral losses for the incumbent, and show that those losses were driven by voters switching from the incumbent to the new party. Three lessons emerge. First, incumbents who preside over state violence may be held electorally accountable by voters. Second, such accountability seemingly depends on the existence of credible opposition parties that can serve as a vector for disaffected voters. Where such parties do not exist, violence may create political cleavages that facilitate the formalization of opposition movements. Third, immediate proximity to violence is correlated with holding incumbents accountable.

Local government elections present opportunities for political opposition to challenge incumbent leaders, thus incentivizing them to better serve the needs of their constituents. However, under certain conditions, these elections fail to serve as this accountability mechanism. We examine the effect of local government elections on the accessibility of healthcare service delivery in Nigerian local governments. Using data on healthcare outcomes between 2010 and 2018 and a difference in difference design, we find that elected local leaders perform no better than unelected leaders across various model specifications. This outcome is attributed to the minimal utilization of local government services and the capture of the state electoral commissions by state governors. Since 2010, the political party of state governors has consistently won a high majority of all local government chairmanship elections, and have also arbitrarily canceled elections entirely. Moreover, qualitative evidence suggests that governors use both appointed or elected positions (when they are held) to reward close allies. Consequently, we conclude that the introduction of local government elections are of little significance to Nigeria's public services due to the capture of both the local government electoral process and local government funds by state governors.

This article assesses the effects of fuel subsidy removal on Nigerian households using panel data from the Nigeria National Longitudinal Phone Survey. Employing a difference-in-differences strategy exploiting geographic variation in fuel supply infrastructure and urban--rural differences in fuel dependence, we find adverse welfare effects following the May 2023 reform. Households in states with greater fuel depot infrastructure experienced larger welfare declines. Urban households experienced greater deterioration in consumption and food security. A triple-difference specification yields results robust to confounding threats. Approximately 87 per cent of respondents disapproved of removal, citing increased prices. Absent compensatory transfers, fuel subsidy removal generates significant welfare costs concentrated among populations most dependent on formal fuel markets.

Low agricultural productivity is a major source of poverty in Africa, where much of the population works in agriculture, yet subsistence production and food insecurity are widespread. However, some pockets of agriculture in Africa are highly productive. In this paper, we assemble a geospatial dataset of all pre-colonial African states in existence between 1500 and 1850, and utilize remote-sensing data based on satellite imagery to show that areas (pixels) in proximity to the location of pre-colonial state capitals display higher levels of contemporary agricultural output. This relationship exists across and within countries, agro-ecological zones, and river basins. We rule out spurious correlation with spatial randomization tests. We argue that via path-dependence and spatial agglomeration effects, pre-colonial states transmitted the territorial reach that was critical for state-led agricultural modernization in the twentieth century. The findings support a growing literature linking contemporary economic development to state capacity transmitted from pre-colonial political institutions.

This paper investigates the impact of the "Man Leopard" murders on contemporary trust in the Nigerian police. The Man Leopard murders occurred in post-World War II Nigeria, in the Calabar Province of the Eastern Region. This was the first case in which the Nigerian colonial police invested heavily in investigating the cause of the murders and convicting those responsible. More than 200 people were killed by what appeared to be an animal between 1943 and 1948. The police found that the killings were carried out by people disguised to look like leopards, using the methods of traditional secret societies. We employ three empirical specifications with progressively broader control groups to assess the robustness of legacy effects: (1) comparing the core Man Leopard affected area to the rest of Calabar Province, (2) comparing Calabar Province to other South Eastern states (our preferred specification), and (3) comparing Calabar Province to the entire country (robustness check). Using data from contemporary surveys, we find evidence of a conditional legacy effect: in our preferred specification, among respondents who have not had trust-depleting contact with contemporary police, Calabar residents exhibit significantly higher trust, consistent with intergenerational transmission of positive attitudes. However, this trust premium is fully eroded by contemporary police contact involving bribe-paying, consistent with the "asymmetry thesis" that trust is hard to win and easy to lose. Our migration analysis following Marbach (2024) reveals that the negative baseline association observed in the broadest specification (whole country comparison) is driven entirely by migrants, while stayers show no significant difference, suggesting that cross-sectional comparisons in legacy studies can be substantially biased by selective sorting.

What determined which African polities received colonial treaties, and how did treaty forms map onto sovereignty outcomes? Using an original dataset of about 450 British treaties in West Africa (1788--1901) extracted from Hertslet's *Map of Africa by Treaty*, I examine the relationship between African political structures and the type of treaty imposed by British agents. I advance three core claims. First, African states that served as commercial intermediaries (middlemen) between European coastal traders and interior producers were subjected to more coercive treaty campaigns designed to eliminate their brokerage monopolies. Second, centralized polities with significant military capacity received individually negotiated treaties with more favorable terms, while smaller decentralized communities received standardized form treaties (Forms 1--10). Third, the progression of treaty forms from simple protection agreements to full territorial cession represented a deliberate strategy of incremental sovereignty erosion, in which initial "protection" clauses contained embedded provisions enabling progressive expansion of colonial control. These findings contribute to ongoing debates about the origins of colonial boundaries and the mechanisms through which imperial claims were constructed and legitimized.

This section to be updated.