IvoSteimanis/Leadership-Namibia

This repository provides the data and analysis files to reproduce the results of the paper "Procedural fairness and nepotism among local traditional and democratic leaders in rural Namibia." forthcoming in Science Advances. Authors: Björn Vollan, Esther Blanco, Fabian Petutschnig, Sebastian Prediger & Ivo Steimanis # Procedural fairness and nepotism among local traditional and democratic leaders in rural Namibia This repository provides the data and analysis files to reproduce the results of the paper "Procedural fairness and nepotism among local traditional and democratic leaders in rural Namibia." forthcoming in Science Advances. ## Abstract In this study, we test the common conception that democratically elected leaders behave in the interest of their constituents to a greater extent than traditional chiefs do. Our sample consists of 64 (real-life) village leaders and 384 villagers in rural Namibia, where democratically elected leaders and traditional chiefs co-exist within the same villages. We analyze two main attributes of local political leaders: their procedural fairness preferences and their preferential treatment of relatives (nepotism). In addition, we measure personality traits, employing an incentivized social preference task and standardized surveys on local governance practices and villagers’ perceptions of their leaders’ performance. Our results contradict the theoretical priors, as they indicate that traditional chiefs are as likely to implement fair, democratic decision-making procedures (68% of chiefs and 58% of democratic leaders), and they are as unlikely to behave nepotistic (25% of chiefs and 40% of democratic leaders). Moreover, elected leaders and chiefs express similar fundamental social preferences and personality traits. These findings are in line with villagers’ perceptions of most leaders in our sample being popular and fair, albeit villagers’ responses reveal a substantial discrepancy between planned and de-facto implementation of democratic institutions at the local level in Namibia. ## Data and analysis files The code in this repository can be used to reproduce the figures and tests in Stata (some packages need to be installed via SSC) but the data file can of course be used with other programs like R or SPSS. - "analysis_leadership.do" inclu …