State expansion and hollowness in contemporary Africa

Many observers and scholars of African politics contend that states keep services and infrastructure sparse in their rural peripheries, especially in regions outside of leaders' co-ethnic bases of support. But is this still true in the 21st Century? If not, why not, and to what extent has this expansion been meaningful for rural citizens seeking substantive services from the state? This dissertation addresses these questions with a variety of original data sources. Chapter 1 frames the key research questions of this dissertation. Chapter 2 presents new data from terabytes of satellite imagery to demonstrate that, contrary to many long-held expectations, nearly all African governments have been significantly expanding basic service delivery infrastructure into their historically neglected rural communities. They have done this, by and large, without favoring regions home to state leaders' co-ethnics. Chapters 3 and 4 then home in on the political economy of state expansion in one African country, Uganda. Chapter 3 demonstrates that the Ugandan government led by President Yoweri Museveni has engaged in the hollow expansion of public infrastructure, building facilities into rural areas while providing them with very few staff or supplies. I explain this puzzling phenomenon by arguing that Uganda has engaged in a kleptocratic path of state expansion, proliferating public facilities as a means of extracting rents in collusion with private construction firms and subsequently neglecting their operations. Leaders extract excess rents from the country's marginalized periphery, as I demonstrate with an original survey of local monitors at recent development project construction sites. In Chapter 4, I use an original survey, with two survey experiments, to show that the Ugandan government sustains this strategy of hollow expansion by successfully diverting blame for staff and supply shortages onto local middlemen. The local, petty corruption in hollow states enables kleptocracy by providing state leaders with political cover. Chapter 5 charts a course for evaluating alternate pathways to the equitable expansion of public services. Together, these chapters offer new insights on the expansion of the state into peripheral communities, the distributive politics of public goods provision, and barriers to political accountability in low- and middle-income countries.