TAX ME IF YOU CAN ETHNIC GEOGRAPHY DEMOCRACY AND THE TAXATION OF AGRICULTURE IN AFRICA Kimuli Kasara Department of Political Science Stanford University kkasara stanford edu November 25 2005 Draft Please do not cite or circulate Abstract It is typically assumed that African leaders enact policies that benefit their ethno regional group using all types of patronage Crop production and political power are geographically concentrated in many African countries and this paper exploits this overlap to cast doubt on this conventional wisdom It shows using data on 50 country crop combinations that cash crop farmer residing in the ruling coalition s home territory face higher taxes and additionally that democratic regimes impose lower taxes This paper shows that farmers who have few alternatives face higher taxes African leaders have used local intermediaries to exert control over the countryside and to ensure that farmers do not support alternative candidates It suggest that as leaders are better at selecting and monitoring these intermediaries in their home areas they can extract more from the majority at home than abroad using taxes on cash crops which are regionally but not individually targetable I am grateful to Sarah Anderson Alberto Diaz Cayeros James Fearon Nahomi Ichino Tonja Jacobi Saumitra Jha David Laitin Peter Lorentzen Beatriz Magaloni Nikolay Marinov Vidal Romero Mike Tomz Jeremy Wallace and seminar participants at the March 2004 meeting of the Working Group on African Political Economy WGAPE and at the Comparative Politics Workshops at Stanford University and Duke University for helpful comments on earlier versions Any mistakes are my own A widespread belief about politics in Africa is that people benefit from patronage when co ethnics hold political power African politicians seem to confirm this intuition when they stress their credentials as a native son of a place Voters confirm it because they prefer to have a presidential candidate from their home area and because parties often receive the bulk of their support from one region and almost no support from other regions This assumption is central to many theories of why ethnic identities become political Most political scientists take seriously a constructivist account of ethnicity in which identities are mobilized in the pursuit of state resources 1 Scholars disagree on why ethnic identities rather than any other social identity should become the basis of competition for a piece of the national cake however on all accounts individuals support co ethnics because they gain from doing so 2 Even scholars who are critical of ethnic politics viewing it as a means by which class competition is concealed and society inequality exacerbated assume that individuals are better off if co ethnics hold power than if they do not Leys 1974 206 Case studies from a number of countries highlight instances in which African leaders have distributed goods to members of their own ethnic group or to their home area For example in Burundi the Fifth Burundian Five Year Plan allocated 98 of gross fixed capital formation to the areas surrounding the capital and to Bururi the home province of the southern Tutsi elite leaving 2 to the other 14 provinces of the country Ngaruko and Nkurunziza 2000 382 Joseph Desire Mobutu of Zaire turned his home village Gbadolite into an opulent city and the Ivorian president Felix Houphou t Boigny even made his hometown the national capital 1 Other explanations of why ethnic identities became salient in Africa stress colonial policies both indirect rule and divide and rule the influence of cultural brokers and people s need to interpret and control rapidly changing societies Vail 1989 2 There are three theories of why ethnic identities become the basis for competition over political goods instead of other identities First ethnic groups are more easily mobilized because of a common language or kinship ties Second that ethnic coalitions may form in competition for because the goods available from the state such as roads and schools which are generally restricted to a certain space Bates 1983 Third ethnic identities could be a good way of constructing coalitions to distribute resources because the ascriptive nature of ethnic identity naturally limits the size of coalitions formed on this basis Fearon 1999 Fourth where information about candidates preferences is scarce ethnic identities provide clues to voters trying to decide if a candidate shares their preferences Chandra 2004 1 Despite these dramatic examples of ethnic favoritism it is worthwhile asking whether leaders reward co ethnics with all kinds of patronage which individuals are most likely to benefit and how political institutions affect the propensity for politicians to reward their own The answers to these questions are not obvious in part because it is surprisingly difficult to demonstrate that leaders always reward their ethno regional base Often all groups claim to receive less than their fair share of the national cake and it is difficult to construct a benchmark of what an unbiased allocation of resources would be It cannot be taken for granted that people benefit when co ethnics hold political power for two reasons First both theoretical and empirical work on how incumbents allocate resources in order to ensure their political survival suggests that under certain conditions incumbents may not distribute resources to their core supporters 3 Second research on the allocation of resources within communities suggests that local level inequalities of wealth education and access to political power exert a powerful influence on who benefits from these resources Platteau 2004 Bardhan and Mookherjee 2000 Although ethnic groups provide a useful shorthand for describing interest groups in many developing countries viewing groups as corporate actors glosses over important internal divisions that may influence the allocation of resources across groups This paper examines how the ethnic identification of cash crop farmers affects how heavily governments tax them Agricultural policy is extremely important because farmers form a majority in many sub Saharan African countries and high levels of agricultural taxation have contributed to massive declines in this vital sector Farmers in the government s home area are assumed to benefit from better prices for their crops Bates 1989 147 argues that once Daniel arap Moi gained political power in Kenya he extracted revenue