Scholars have long identified political bias in the way African politicians distribute state resources. Much of this literature focuses on the role of group identities, mainly ethnicity, and partisanship. This article shifts the focus to local governments, which have become increasingly important players in basic social service provision, and argues that public goods allocation under democratic decentralization is intimately shaped by historical identities. Specifically, the author highlights the role of identities rooted in the precolonial past. To explain this, she articulates a theory of institutional congruence, arguing that greater spatial overlap between formal institutional space and informal social identities improves the ability of elites to overcome local coordination problems. Looking to the West African state of Senegal, the author deploys a nested analysis, drawing on interviews with rural Senegalese elites to understand how the precolonial past shapes local politics today via the social identities it left behind. She also tests the argument with a unique, geocoded data set of village-level public goods investments in the 2000s, finding that areas that were once home to precolonial states distribute goods more broadly across space. These patterns cannot be explained by ethnic or electoral dynamics. Two brief examples from on-the-line cases illuminate how the presence of precolonial identities facilitates local cooperation. The article thus calls into question the tendency to treat identities as static over time, highlighting the interactive relationship between institutions and identities while drawing attention to emerging subnational variation in local government performance following decentralization reforms across the developing world.

中文翻译：

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公共物品交付中的前殖民遗产和制度一致性

长期以来，学者们一直在非洲政客分配国家资源的方式中发现政治偏见。这些文献大多关注群体身份的作用，主要是种族和党派关系。本文将焦点转移到地方政府，它们在基本社会服务提供中变得越来越重要，并认为民主分权下的公共产品分配密切地受到历史身份的影响。具体来说，作者强调了植根于前殖民时代的身份的作用。为了解释这一点，她阐述了一种制度一致性理论，认为正式制度空间和非正式社会身份之间更大的空间重叠提高了精英克服地方协调问题的能力。放眼西非塞内加尔，作者通过对塞内加尔农村精英的采访进行了嵌套分析，以了解前殖民时代如何通过其留下的社会身份塑造今天的地方政治。她还用 2000 年代村级公共产品投资的独特地理编码数据集检验了这一论点，发现曾经是前殖民国家所在地的地区在空间上更广泛地分配货物。这些模式不能用种族或选举动态来解释。来自在线案例的两个简短例子说明了前殖民身份的存在如何促进地方合作。因此，这篇文章质疑了随着时间的推移将身份视为静态的趋势，