"Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? This book advances a novel answer to this question by looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa: communities are better able to coordinate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms of appropriate comportment in the public sphere demarcated by group boundaries. I advance a theory of institutional congruence to explain these differences, highlighting how twin mechanisms of a shared sense of social identification and dense network ties alter local elite behavior under decentralization. These attributes fall unevenly across space, however, meaning that institutional congruence only emerges in areas that were home to precolonial kingdoms where collective identities and social ties have persisted over time. I develop and test this argument through a multi-method research design to show that local politics of representation and redistribution are broader in cases of high congruence, but contentious and targeted in areas where it is low"-- Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? Looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa, this book advances a novel answer to this question: communities are better able to coordinate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms. This book identifies the precolonial past as the driver of striking subnational variation in the present because these social institutions only encompass the many villages of the local state in areas that were once home to precolonial polities. Drawing on a multi-method research design, the book develops and tests a theory of institutional congruence to document how the past shapes contemporary elite approaches to redistribution within the local state. Where precolonial kingdoms left behind collective identities and dense social networks, local elites find it easier to cooperate following decentralization.
