Early Statehood Boosted Support for Autocracy in Africa

🧭 What the Paper Asks and Finds

Recent scholarship links pre-modern political practices to long-run institutional outcomes. This study identifies a distinct channel: the legacy of early statehood shapes ordinary Africans' attitudes, increasing support for autocratic rule rather than only affecting institutions themselves. Using survey data from Africa, a positive relationship is documented between early statehood development and popular support for autocratic government.

📊 Survey Evidence and How the Relationship Was Tested

• Survey data from multiple African countries and rounds are used to measure individual support for autocratic rule.
• The positive association between early statehood and pro-autocracy attitudes remains after controlling for a wide range of pre-treatment and post-treatment covariates.
• Robustness strategies include:
• country and survey-round fixed effects
• extensive covariate adjustment
• an instrumental-variable design to address potential endogeneity

🔎 Where the Effect Is Strongest

Findings are especially pronounced among respondents belonging to precolonially centralized ethnic groups in former British colonies. This pattern suggests that locally surviving traditional institutions help transmit norms rooted in precolonial autocratic socialization, reinforcing individual-level support for autocratic rule.

💡 Why This Matters

• The results point to an attitudinal mechanism linking early state development to contemporary political outcomes: long-run socialization, not just institutional inheritance, can sustain support for nondemocratic rule.
• This implies that efforts to understand or promote democratization must account for deeply rooted normative legacies that persist at the level of citizens' preferences.