Independence and Institutional Legacies

It was a landmark in history: In 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African state to achieve independence from colonial rule, having previously been under the control of Great Britain. 

But gaining political independence does not mean the past is left behind, and there has long been public debate about the many long-term effects of the colonial period on state and society in subsequent decades.  

Now, an empirically rich study explores one aspect of the Ghanaian state, the composition of its bureaucracy, during and after British rule. The study finds that two ethnic groups, the Ga and the Fante, which made up 14 percent of the population combined, held over 70 percent of public-sector positions in the 1950s, suggesting goods such as desirable jobs had been heavily distributed along group lines. 

“At the moment of independence, you have a state that is not meritocratic, and is highly captured by certain ethnic groups,” says MIT scholar Noah Nathan, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study’s findings. As a result, he adds, “You can imagine the politics that creates, which are demands to equalize access to state power and state authority. And things start off on this foot of ethnic political competition over the state. That is in part a legacy of colonial state-building.”

At least in this case, “Independence in Africa wasn’t this hard break from the past,” suggests Nathan, a Ford International Professor of Political Science in MIT’s Department of Political Science. “Africans became the leaders of their countries, but the state institutions that they inherited weren’t born fresh at independence. They were carried over from the colonial period.”

The paper, “The Seeds of State Capture: Merit and Patrimonialism in the Colonial Bureaucracy,” is published in advance online form in the American Political Science Review. Nathan’s co-authors are Sarah Brierley, an associate professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science; George Kwaku Ofoso, an associate professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science; and Tingxuan Zhu PhD ’26, a recent graduate of MIT’s doctoral program in political science at MIT. 

Analyzing names

To conduct the study, the scholars dug into records from the period of British rule in Ghana, which extended from the 19th century until 1957. Using documents from the British National Archives, they examined individual-level employment records for 11,702 bureaucrats from the colonial-era civil service, building a dataset spanning from 1897 to 1955. The records included 6,879 Ghanaian civil servants and 4,805 European civil servants. The scholars’ aim was to shed light on the dynamics of civil service hiring and politics. 

British leaders at the time, and some commentators subsequently, have cast the colonial state as one built on rational, merit-based principles — what scholars call a “Weberian” bureaucracy, named after the famous German sociologist Max Weber. Scholars say that other types of bureaucracies, in contrast, display “patrimonialism,” with jobs being assigned not on merit but through patronage.

To analyze this question further, the scholars looked at 13.8 million names of registered voters from contemporary Ghana, along with localized ethnicity data from the 2010 national census. They used this to establish a baseline of the relationship between names and ethnicity in the country. Then, the scholars went back to the historical archives, and, using the names there, determined the ethnicities of past Ghanaian civil servants, from 1897 to 1955. 

Ultimately this approach showed that on the eve of independence, the Ga and Fante had managed to gain a percentage of civil service jobs that was five times greater than the percentage of the population they represented. That strongly suggests that the colonial-era bureaucracy built under British rule was not merit-based, at least in terms of overall composition. 

“Scholars have said this post-1957 independent Ghana brings with it the introduction of patrimonialism into the bureaucracy, and we’re saying this was going on long before,” Nathan explains. “It actually wasn’t meritocratic at all, and Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, didn’t inherit some Weberian rational bureaucracy that he then destroyed. He inherited this thing rife with patrimonialism and patronage, that he then adapted. And that’s a very different interpretation of the post-independence period.”

Exams and education

To further examine the question of merit, the scholars even obtained individual-level results from Ghana’s civil service exams, then analyzed those in relation to which applicants got hired — or passed over for jobs. The results indicate little correspondence between exam results and job offers, again suggesting that ethnicity and social ties mattered more in hiring, on aggregate. 

“If you were from the right ethnic group, you were going to get a job, even if you did pretty poorly on the civil service exam,” Nathan says. “And people from disfavored ethnic groups who did much better on the exam were not getting the same positions.”

The study also rules out a seemingly logical explanation for at least part of the ethnic skew in the composition of the Ghanaian civil service — that hiring reflected levels of educational attainment, even if access to schooling itself might have reflected ethnic iniquities. But the data indicate that was not a factor. 

The scholars located every school in the country geographically, dating to the 1890s, and closely measured access to education for all ethnic groups over time. The Ga and Fante groups may have had some initial advantages in this regard, but by the 1930s, many other groups had caught up in educational attainment and still were not procuring the same relative numbers of civil services jobs through the 1950s. 

“At least in this case, that can’t explain why these two groups got favored in the hiring process,” Nathan says. “It wasn’t just a direct outcome of the fact that some parts of society had more education than others.”

As it happens, geographical proximity to civil service jobs is also not an explanatory factor; the scholars also examined the locations of government offices and found they cannot account for the quantity of jobs going to the Ga and Fante. 

Out of sight

Instead, the researchers believe the likeliest scenario is that, once established in the civil service, people from the Ga and Fante managed to use their social connections to get more and more jobs offered to others from their own groups. Moreover, they may have done so not necessarily with explicit British approval, but with something more resembling indifference on the part of the colonial rulers. 

“The mechanics of the hiring process were very decentralized,” Nathan says. “And the British didn’t know very much about the society they were governing. That created an information asymmetry where local bureaucrats could get friends into jobs in a way their superiors were either not aware of or didn’t have very much incentive to stop.”

All told, Nathan observes, “The ministry of finance in Ghana in 1957 isn’t some new thing that’s created from scratch. It’s the colonial ministry of finance that’s been in place for 60 years, and the bureaucrats in it showed up to work the next day in the same jobs. [The new leaders] inherited thousands of employees who had gotten there through this process.”

The study is one of several that Nathan has published using data to answer questions that span both political science and history. Quantifying the issue in a granular way helps illuminate the large-scale political dynamics.

“People have written about this in broad strokes, even the fact that certain ethnic groups in some countries got more access to positions than others, but they haven’t had detailed microdata on exactly who got which job and when,” Nathan says. “That’s the innovation of our paper … we could unpack the nuts and bolts of how this hiring process happened, and in doing so dispel some conventional wisdom about how African states were built in the colonial period.”

The new paper is not the only piece of scholarship taking this kind of data-intensive approach to studying colonial state-building and its legacy. Ada Johnson-Kanu, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, has conducted this sort of study of Nigeria’s bureaucracy over time, in work she completed in 2021. 

Nathan, for his part, says he hopes that other scholars can expand upon this kind of data-driven approach to digging into certain historical questions. 

“There is just incredibly rich archival evidence out there in the world for a lot of countries,” Nathan observes. “I think this is a really fun way to do research.”