TY  - JOUR
AU  - Rainer, Ilia
AU  - Trebbi, Francesco
TI  - New Tools for the Analysis of Political Power in Africa
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 18424
PY  - 2012
Y2  - September 2012
DO  - 10.3386/w18424
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18424
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18424.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Ilia Rainer
Department of Economics, MSN 3G4
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
E-Mail: irainer@gmu.edu

Francesco Trebbi
Haas School of Business
University of California, Berkeley
2220 Piedmont Ave
Berkeley, CA 94720
E-Mail: ftrebbi@berkeley.edu
M1  - published as Ilia Rainer, Francesco Trebbi. "New Tools for the Analysis of Political Power in Africa," in Sebastian Edwards, Simon Johnson, and David N. Weil, editors, "African Successes, Volume I: Government and Institutions" University of Chicago Press (2016)

M3  - presented at "African Development Successes", August 3-5, 2011
AB  - The study of autocracies and weakly institutionalized countries is plagued by scarcity of information about the relative strength of different players within the political system. This paper presents novel data on the composition of government coalitions in a sample of fifteen post-colonial African countries suited to this task. We emphasize the role of the executive branch as the central fulcrum of all national political systems in our sample, especially relative to other institutional bodies such as the legislative assembly. Leveraging on the impressive body of work documenting the crucial role of ethnic fragmentation as a main driver of political and social friction in Africa, the paper further details the construction of ethnic composition measures for executive cabinets. We discuss how this novel source of information may help shed light on the inner workings of typically opaque African political elites.
ER  -