While it is often pointed out that African countries have large government cabinets that underpin economic performance, lesser is known about the factors behind the size of government cabinets in Africa. Using an original database of the number of ministerial appointments in government offices in 35 African states, this paper establishes a robust negative relationship between the size of the government cabinet and the exclusion based on ethnicity. This result suggests that the governments that are more inclusive tend to be the largest, independent to the number of ethnic groups present in the country, namely, the state of the ethno-linguistic fractionalization. However, the results also show that this inclusion is in favor of powerless positions, suggesting that inclusion might be less about power-sharing than it is about resource-sharing, since the incumbent controls the key positions, while the included ethnic groups have peripheral positions with, however, an access to public rents. The results are robust to various sensitivity analyses.

人们经常指出，非洲国家拥有庞大的政府内阁来支撑经济表现，但人们对非洲政府内阁规模背后的因素知之甚少。本文使用了非洲35个州政府机关中的部长任命数量的原始数据库，在政府内阁规模与基于种族的排斥之间建立了牢固的负相关关系。该结果表明，包容性更高的政府往往是最大的政府，而与该国存在的族裔群体的数量（即民族-语言划分状态）无关。但是，结果还表明，这种包容有利于无权的职位，这表明包容性与权力共享相比，对权力共享的关注要少，由于任职者控制着关键职位，而所包括的族裔则拥有外围职位，但是可以获得公共租金。该结果对于各种灵敏度分析是可靠的。