Chiefs: Economic Development and Elite Control of Civil Society in Sierra Leone

By Daron Acemoglu, T. Reed, James A. Robinson. Journal of Political Economy, 2014

434 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the effect of constraints on chiefs' power on economic outcomes, citizens' attitudes, and social capital. A paramount chief in Sierra Leone must come from a ruling family originally recognized by British colonial authorities. In chiefdoms with fewer ruling families, chiefs face less political competition, and development outcomes are significantly worse today. Variation in the security of property rights over land is a potential mechanism. Paradoxically, with fewer ruling families, the institutions of chiefs' authority are more highly respected, and measured social capital is higher. We argue that these results reflect the capture of civil society organizations by chiefs.

Subfields: Demography, Information Systems, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef8fafe42fa43b53ea95696f19b8fa2a83ddacce

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. E. Nillesen
2. Pablo Querubin
3. E. Olsen
4. Andreas Kotsadam
5. Erwin H. Bulte
6. Ruth V. Aguilera
7. Cesi Cruz
8. C. Knutsen

In Information Systems

1. E. Nillesen
2. E. Olsen
3. Andreas Kotsadam
4. Erwin H. Bulte
5. Ruth V. Aguilera
6. C. Knutsen
7. Tore Wig

In Soil Science

1. E. Nillesen
2. Andreas Kotsadam
3. Erwin H. Bulte
4. Stuti Khemani

Citations in the corpus

• Politician Family Networks and Electoral Outcomes: Evidence from the Philippines (2017, background): “…2014).3 In particular, networks have been linked to the diffusion of information (Banerjee et al., 2013; Alatas et al., 2016; Larson and Lewis, 2017), conflict outcomes (König et al., forthcoming) and the broader mechanisms of political control (Puga and Trefler, 2014; Acemoglu et al., 2014).”
• Corruption, investments and contributions to public goods: Experimental evidence from rural Liberia (2014, background): “Acemoglu et al. (2013) document for neighboring Sierra Leone that more powerful “Paramount Chiefs” tend to provide less local public goods, so that power of the chief and rural development are negatively correlated.”
• Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party (2017, neutral): “Our findings complement and extend the results by Acemoglu et al. (2014), who conclude that powerful chiefs in Sierra Leone “build social capital as a way to control and monitor society” (363).”
• Mining and Local Corruption in Africa (2017, background): “Our study thus adds not only to the broader resource curse literature, but also to the literatures on local effects of mining activities and the rapidly growing literature on the determinants of local-level institutions (e.g., Nunn and Wantchekon, 2011; Acemoglu et al., 2014).”
• Varieties of institutional systems: A contextual taxonomy of understudied countries (2016, background): “For instance, Acemoglu, Reed, and Robinson (2014) explain that in some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, a set of very few ruling families, originally recognized by British colonial authorities, capture much of the means of production.”