Traditional Leaders, Service Delivery, and Electoral Accountability

Traditional leaders and customary governance institutions remain important, especially at the local level, in many low-income countries. Indeed, many observers have noted a recent resurgence in the importance of traditional institutions (Englebert, 2002; Holzinger, Kern and Kromrey, 2015; Logan, 2009), contrary to the expectations and goals of modernists (Mamdani, 1996). The persistence and revival of these institutions is particularly obvious in Africa (Baldwin, 2016b; Logan, 2013), but has also been noted in Latin America (Dı́az-Cayeros, Magaloni and Ruiz-Euler, 2014; Van Cott, 2008) and Asia (Henley and Davidson, 2008; Murtazashvili, 2016). As a result, aid agencies are constantly making choices about how best to interact with traditional leaders. In programming areas as diverse as justice, the environment, security sector reform, public health and community empowerment, donors need to decide how to treat traditional chiefs, whether it be by adopting conscious strategies of engagement, choosing deliberate policies of avoidance, or taking ad hoc decisions based on the logistical needs in specific settings.1 In light of this, the goal of this chapter is to review recent evidence on the effects of traditional leaders on locally organized public goods provision, government performance and electoral accountability, with an eye to informing future choices by policymakers and program coordinators. This topic is relevant to aid agencies working in diverse geographic areas, although as an empirical matter, most academic research on this topic has been conducted in sub-Saharan Africa. ⇤Department of Political Science, Yale University, katharine.baldwin@yale.edu. †Department of Government, Harvard University, praffler@fas.harvard.edu. 1For examples of each of these types of choices, see Sheely (2013b), Denney (2013), and Vajja and White (2006) respectively.