by: Janina Beiser-McGrath, Sam Erkiletian and Nils Metternich
| What are the conditions under which governments form more ethnically inclusive coalitions? Existing contributions highlight strategic incentives, colonial legacies, and pre-colonial legacies as determinants of ethnically inclusive government coalitions in African states. We argue that Pan-African ideological preferences for ethnically inclusive government play a vital role in leaders’ decisions to share power with other ethnic communities. We leverage novel data on African government leaders’ attendance of Pan-African conferences before their tenure. Accounting for rival mechanisms and country- and year-fixed effects, we find that African political leaders that attended Pan-African conferences oversaw ethnically more inclusive government coalitions. Our findings imply that the ideological influence and commitment signaled by conference attendance affected political leaders’ approach to form more inclusive governments and that ethnic coalitions have systematically unexplored legacies in the Pan-African decolonization movements. |
Authoritarian Political Systems Group 