4 - Political Narratives across Rural Senegal

Summary

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.