One of the central claims of this study is that the impact of informal social institutions is contingent on the formal institutional environment they operate within. This chapter looks at the historical trajectory of basic public goods investments in Senegal from the onset of colonial rule in 1880 to the present to evaluate this claim by extending the dataset on village-level public goods access backward in time to the onset of French colonial rule using archival data and ministerial reports. By so "decompressing" history, the analysis unpacks spatial and temporal processes to isolate the 1996 decentralization reforms as the moment that precolonial legacies emerge to shape the spatial distribution of local public goods access. At the same time, the historical dataset allows me to take into account prominent historical alternative explanations that suggest enduring colonial legacies might supersede the precolonial effects I document. I find that the colonial past did matter, but that its effects on access to rural public goods have largely faded by the era of decentralization.

Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? This book offers a novel answer to this question by looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa: local actors are better able to cooperate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms of appropriate comportment in the public sphere demarcated by group boundaries. In this introductory chapter, I lay out the main contours of my theory as well as the implications that the argument holds for key debates in Comparative Politics, including the use of narratives as a lens into actors’ political strategies, the social identities we prioritize in our research, prospects for state-building in sub-Saharan Africa, and our understanding of how historical legacies shape contemporary development outcomes.

This chapter examines aggregate electoral returns to measure the influence of the political Islam cleavage on voting behavior in contemporary Indonesia. Existing research suggests that electoral behavior is driven primarily by patronage, candidate traits and evaluations of government performance rather than ideological and partisan considerations. Yet existing studies do not analyze the full spectrum of available electoral returns (both over time and across district) to reach such conclusions. As a result, our understanding of how deep-seated partisan affiliations rooted in political Islam have shaped voting behavior since democratization is incomplete. A quantitative analysis of district-level electoral returns from five legislative elections indicates that electoral geography today presents important continuities with the first democratic election of 1955, when politics was highly ideological and polarized. Furthermore, a longitudinal analysis indicates that the importance of historical partisan affiliations as a driver of voting behavior, after plummeting in the 2009 elections, has increased significantly in recent years.

The chapter introduces the approach to Latin American politics and society adopted in the book. It discusses the topics covered in the book’s historical overview and anticipates the argument that progress was made regarding democracy and nation building, but that gains concerning state capacity and socioeconomic development have been more elusive. It justifies the focus on democracy in the analysis of contemporary Latin America; argues that Latin America has made progress on easy problems, but failed to resolve hard problems, regarding democracy and citizenship; and introduces the book's overarching argument that problems of democracy have prevented the elimination of problems for democracy, and problems for democracy block the possibility of reducing problems of democracy.

Chapter 2 discusses how the sense of nationhood in Latin American countries has evolved since 1880, and how the construction of nations has been closely linked to racial and ethnic identities. It shows that nations were not built from scratch, and that nation builders were conditioned by legacies from pre-Columbian and colonial times. It also demonstrates that nation building is an ongoing, never-finished project. Indeed, it identifies three distinct periods in the process of nation building. In a first period, an elite vision of the nation, which took white, civilized Europe as a model, prevailed. In a second period, a national-popular vision of the nation took center stage, and el pueblo (the people) was considered the true essence of the nation. Finally, in a third, ongoing period, nationhood has been understood in multicultural terms and, for the first time in the history of Latin America, the distinctiveness of indigenous peoples and of Afro-descendants has been recognized and treated as legitimate. It argues that, over time, the sense of nationhood has become more inclusive of different races and ethnicities.

This chapter engages with theories of democratic origin and persistence, late developing states (following Gerschenkron), and workforce dependencies in post-communist settings to suggest how understanding the genesis of the middle class/bourgeoisie in imperial Russia, and distinguishing it from a middle class that is state-fabricated rapidly as part of communist late development catch-up, could help refine theories of the links between the bourgeoisie/middle class and democracy. Based on analysis of author-gathered regional and district data on estate structure and voting for the imperial First, Second, Third, and Fourth Dumas and post-communist parliament, and ascertaining that the “old” middle class exhibits greater democratic proclivities than the “new,” I corroborate the theory of a two-pronged middle class. I first explain how unpacking the genesis, resilience, and political orientations of the multilayered stratum of the educated estates nuances ongoing debates about the interaction between distinct sets of legacies associated with pre-communist and communist regimes. Next, I present analysis that systematically extrapolates the insights from the dissection of the reproduction of the social structure to explain variations in subnational democratic quality in Russia. I also perform a placebo test demonstrating how the deportation of entire communities, the Volga Germans, wipes out the effect of a social legacy.

Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? This book offers a novel answer to this question by looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa: local actors are better able to cooperate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms of appropriate comportment in the public sphere demarcated by group boundaries. In this introductory chapter, I lay out the main contours of my theory as well as the implications that the argument holds for key debates in Comparative Politics, including the use of narratives as a lens into actors’ political strategies, the social identities we prioritize in our research, prospects for state-building in sub-Saharan Africa, and our understanding of how historical legacies shape contemporary development outcomes.

One of the central claims of this study is that the impact of informal social institutions is contingent on the formal institutional environment they operate within. This chapter looks at the historical trajectory of basic public goods investments in Senegal from the onset of colonial rule in 1880 to the present to evaluate this claim by extending the dataset on village-level public goods access backward in time to the onset of French colonial rule using archival data and ministerial reports. By so "decompressing" history, the analysis unpacks spatial and temporal processes to isolate the 1996 decentralization reforms as the moment that precolonial legacies emerge to shape the spatial distribution of local public goods access. At the same time, the historical dataset allows me to take into account prominent historical alternative explanations that suggest enduring colonial legacies might supersede the precolonial effects I document. I find that the colonial past did matter, but that its effects on access to rural public goods have largely faded by the era of decentralization.

In this chapter, we develop the theoretical framework of the book. Specifically, we advance the concept of the Janus-faced legacies of the CPSU. On the one hand, the CPSU is seen as an example of “Communist” legacies, associated specifically with the functioning of Communist rule in Russia. On the other hand, CPSU legacies can be associated with the prevailing clientelism and patronal politics of the Communist era. CPSU legacies could be associated with the ideological loyalty of the former Communists to the party, but also (and this appears to be more likely, given the contemporary accounts) with opportunism and willingness to adjust to any political environment in order to promote one’s career. The chapter links the investigation of the book to the broader literature on historical legacies, as well as outlines the main hypotheses guiding our investigation.

This chapter’s goal is to introduce the main arguments and the concepts of the book. It formulates the research question and provides the first illustrations of the importance of CPSU legacies in Russia. It presents the logic of the subsequent investigation, the key theoretical approaches, and the main elements of methodology

Despite its emergence from one of the more repressive communist states, and the prompt dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992, the new Czech Republic successfully democratized, marketized, and integrated into the complex of European institutions. In 2017, the Czech year-end growth rate of 5.5 percent led the OECD countries in Eastern Europe, and the Bertelsman Transformation index of 2018 ranked the Czech Republic as the leading consolidated democracy and market economy of the 129 countries ranked. This performance, however, masks some significant unresolved problems. This chapter explores the evolution of the Czech post-communist regime in three stages. The first part unpacks some important historical legacies of the multiple regimes the Czech Republic experienced in the twentieth century – parliamentary democracy in the interwar First Republic, the Nazi protectorate in World War Two, and the communist state. Attention then turns to the institutional framework for democratic decision-making. The final step is to analyze the broad political process under this system, emphasizing some of the distinctive dynamics that have created accountability problems in Czech politics and left some key problems still to resolve, not least the Czech version of Europe’s populist nationalist problem.