Download or read book Three Essays on Traditional Chiefs and Politics in Africa written by Timothy Jay Peterka and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In sub-Saharan Africa, the traditional and modern exist side by side. There, traditional chiefs, subnational elites who enjoy elevated social status by virtue of their historical ties to their local area, work with formal governments and maintain an active role in the everyday lives of people across the region. Despite this pattern, we lack an understanding of how their influence shapes politics. To fill the gap, I examine how chiefs shape the central political economy of development outcomes of clientelism, social conflict, patronage, and opposition fragmentation. In the first paper, I describe how political parties leverage the social influence chiefs wield to hire them on as electoral intermediaries during elections. However, when chiefs are ineffectual partners, parties seek out alternative sources of social influence in the form of opinion leaders. In the second paper, I move to outlining how chiefs shape levels of social conflict. I argue that social conflict is most likely when chiefs are neither very weak nor very strong. In regions with midrange chiefs, authority is contested and violence a more likely tool of political redress. In the third paper, I return to the electoral world and ask how chiefs can make the electoral playing field more equal. I posit that the strongest chiefs can directly blunt the patronage swords incumbents wield by refusing to join the patronage coalition. Strong chiefs too, when aligned with incumbents during the democratic transition, indirectly facilitate opposition consolidation. Together, the dissertation papers demonstrate how chiefs affect outcomes with very real impacts on the material lives of people in the region. The dissertation contributes to a wider literature on the impact of traditional institutions and subnational elites on political outcomes in other parts of the world.