Colonies can be roughly differentiated into directly ruled or “settler” colonies that often reproduced systems of governance used in Europe and were administered in a highly centralized and bureaucratic form, and indirectly ruled colonies that outsourced local governance to “traditional” indigenous authorities.
This paper identifies indirect colonial rule as an important determinant of whether ethnicity becomes politically salient in the post-colonial context. First it demonstrates the existence of a cross-national relationship between indirect colonial rule and the salience of ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa. It then identifies the effect of indirect colonial rule through a within-country natural experiment in Namibia.
Northern Namibia was indirectly ruled by German and later South African authorities, whereas southern Namibia experienced direct rule. Whether a locality in the border zone was directly or indirectly ruled was shaped by the spatial extent of direct German colonial rule at the time of an 1897 rinderpest epidemic.
Exploiting this plausibly exogenous assignment to treatment in the border zone, this paper shows that in indirectly ruled areas, today’s party system is more ethnically divided, ethnic parties do substantially better than non-ethnic parties at securing electoral support, and individuals are more likely to identify with their ethnic group than in directly ruled areas. The paper then explores potential causal mechanisms and find evidence for the importance of the legacy of institutionalized ethnic divisions in indirectly ruled areas of Namibia.