Abstract

We test the claim that African leaders favor members of their own ethnic groups by studying ethnic favoritism in the education sector in Kenya. We use data on the educational attainment of more than fifty thousand Kenyans dating back to the colonial era, as well as information about the ethnic identities of Kenyan presidents, cabinet members, and high-level education bureaucrats since the 1960s. Consistent with previous work, we find that having a coethnic as president during one's school-age years is associated with an increase in the schooling that children acquire. In contrast to recent studies, we find that multiparty political competition has no impact on the degree of ethnic favoritism in the education sector. We also go beyond prior work in three ways. First, we show that coethnics of the minister of education also acquire more schooling than children from other ethnic groups — evidence that ministerial appointments come with real power to impact distributive politics. Second, we investigate the effects of coethnicity using different definitions of the president's ethnic community and provide evidence that the beneficiaries of ethnic favoritism can shift with the introduction of democratic electoral competition. Third, we examine several mechanisms through which having a coethnic president might matter and find much greater support for mechanisms emphasizing the supply of inputs to coethnics than those emphasizing the demand by coethnics for greater educational opportunities.