Author Meets Critics: Catherine Boone's "Political Cleavage in Africa"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Catherine Boone's new book, Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design (CUP 2024), leverages classic and new theory in comparative political economy to reinterpret African countries' postcolonial trajectories. Existing literatures have found economic cleavages, institutions, and issue politics to be of low significance and salience in national politics in African countries. This work inverts these arguments by training the analytic focus on regional economic cleavages, territorial political institutions, and growth policies that are spatially-targeted. Drawing upon Lipset and Rokkan's (1967) theories of the "economics of nation building" and Rogers and Beramendi (2022) on "political economy in territorially-divided states," this book argues that forms of regionalism that are observed in spatially-divided countries around the world are clearly visible in Africa. As earlier works on sectionalism and uneven development in the US, Europe, and other parts of the developing world would predict, regionalism within African countries emerges in the issue areas of redistributive policy, sectoral policy, market integration, and state design. A reinterpretation of the dynamics of national competition and cleavage follows from this, situating African countries within the main currents of political regionalism and core-periphery politics that have shaped national economic integration in other parts of the world.

This author-meets-critics roundtable brings together scholars of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia who have shaped how comparativists theorize the roles of institutions, identity, and subnational dynamics in the making of national politics, focusing on electoral democracies of the developing world. Daniel Posner has written extensively and impactfully on institutions and identity in African countries, advancing influential arguments that both overlap with, and challenge Boone's findings. Anne Pitcher's corpus of work concentrates on the intertwining of political economy and political-institutional factors in shaping national-level politics and policy outcomes (both sectoral and economy-wide) across diverse African countries. Ken Ochieng' Opalo compares and contrasts historical trajectories of political and institutional development, focusing on African legislatures in ways that intersect with and may challenge this book's main arguments about elections and electoral geography, and analyzing dynamics of party development, clientelism, and devolution. Agustina Giraudy has leveraged her regional focus on Latin America to help carve out a distinctive field of "subnational research" in comparative politics, contributing both theory and method to understanding territorial variation in political and policy outcomes within countries, as well as how such unevenness can shape national-level possibilities. Adnan Naseemullah's sweeping comparative analyses of uneven development and subnational politics in South Asia put him in an ideal position to evaluate possible implications of Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa for studies of ethnicity, institutions, and territorial politics in broader comparative politics literatures. Leonardo Arriola will chair, bring together wide expertise in both African Politics and political behavior, and a capacious view of Political Science as a discipline.

The panelists are invited to evaluate and assess the plausibility of the book's arguments, how they speak to rival claims in the relevant literatures, and implications for comparative theories of political cleavages, economic inequality, and state- and nation-building. Generalizing across world regions, the research considered here pushes us to ask whether and how the politics of regional economic inequality differs from the politics of income inequality (or class politics), and how such effects in the developing world may differ from (or converge with) the politics of spatial inequality in the post-industrial economies of the US and Europe.

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Chair

• Leonardo R. Arriola University of California, Berkeley

Presenters

• Daniel N. Posner University of California, Los Angeles

• M. Anne Pitcher University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Ken Ochieng' Opalo Georgetown University

• Agustina Giraudy American University

• Adnan Naseemullah King's College London