The critique of Property and Political Order laid out by Schneider in this issue of PoP is, in essence, a rejection of comparative politics and theory-building. Schneider prefers that each place and time be considered in its infinite diversity and idiosyncrasy. My book does the opposite. It offers a comparative, institutionalist theory of African land tenure regimes, how they vary, and their political effects. It rests upon about 30 subnational-level “case studies” from 10 African countries (some analyzed more intensively than others), tracking several of them longitudinally so to test predictions about variation across space and over time. The analysis works deductively, presenting a theory and then testing its predictions against real-world cases and showing that these predictions hold up in most of the cases, most of the time. Given the costs of such a strategy in terms of possible loss of detail, what are the benefits?
The main benefits, I would say, lie in conceptualization of “land tenure regimes” an institutional domain in African countries, development of a typology of how (and partially, of why) they vary in African countries, development of a causal theory around this “variable,” and demonstration of the salience of this new variable in explaining some long-present (some long-observed) but hitherto poorly explained political outcomes in African countries. These outcomes include rural ethnic conflict, rural war, uneven territorial projection of state power, regime stability in the face of urban opposition and resistance, and rural election-related violence.
More generally, Property and Political Order is a theory of structure and change in African states and agrarian societies. Much of the political science work on African politics and government in the last 15 years has been grounded in the analysis of electoral data, survey data, and experiments based on microeconomic modeling and behavioral economic theorizing. Institutions and social-structure have to be taken as either given (fixed) or absent, either for theoretical reasons (such as the desire to model individual-level determinants of outcomes) or practical reasons (“there is no data” and/or it is too hard to collect or develop), or both. All researchers must make strategic choices, but one cumulative cost of individual researchers’ choices has been a sort of “tragedy of the commons” in African studies whereby we have come to know less and less about political and economic institutions, and less and less about commonalities and variation in socio-economic context. Yet this kind of theoretical infrastructure is necessary to any attempt to construct valid comparisons and contrasts, and to generalize across place and time in African countries. Without concepts and theories of structure and structural change (and debates around the scientific and historical validity of these), knowledge accumulation is impossible. Yet Africa is becoming an ever larger part of the world as we know it (measured by population share) and our societies are converging in some unexpected ways toward African experiences (eg. sluggish growth with high rates of structural unemployment, rise of particularistic nationalisms and big-man politics, Polanyian-type reactions to accelerated commodification of labor and resources). Political science can make good use of concepts, theories, and evidence about structure and change in Africa states and societies, now more than ever.
