Public services, security and the legacy of pre-colonial states in Uganda

Public services are a crucial prerequisite for social and economic development, but the provision of such services and peoples’ willingness to contribute by paying tax differ greatly across communities within countries. The literature has provided an array of theories and evidence attempting to explain these variations. Differences in the quality of local institutions and community norms and culture are generally identified as important factors. However, the literature does not provide adequate answers to the root causes of the differences in the quality of local institutions and community norms that lead to various tax and public service outcomes. If divergence in outcomes rests on differences in institutions and norms, an important research question is why these institutions and norms differ between communities.  In this project we have examined the role of pre-colonial centralization in explaining the variation in citizens’ tax compliance norms in contemporary Uganda. 

This research project addressed these gaps in the literature by examining whether and how citizens’ willingness to contribute to tax and public services in Uganda today is shaped by the legacy of pre-colonial states. It also examined the underlying mechanisms by focusing on persistence in culture and persistence in institutions. In addition, the project investigated how variations in pre-colonial institutions and their (non) disruption during the colonial and post-colonial periods have affected peoples’ perceptions of and experiences with local taxes, and whether and how citizens connect taxes with local service delivery. Focusing on one country allowed us to exploit the within-country variation in pre-colonial institutions that are not affected by national institutions or the identity of former colonial rule.

Before colonization, states in Africa were generally classified into stateless societies and centralized polities, which had an organized force to uphold authority and could uniformly apply policies. The large variation in pre-colonial states across Uganda provided a unique opportunity to study these mechanisms. By combining geo-referenced anthropological data on pre-colonial ethnic homelands with survey data from several rounds of the Afrobarometer Survey, we found that respondents from the historically centralized homelands exhibited a higher willingness to pay tax compared to respondents from the non-centralized areas. We also found that the stronger norm for tax compliance in pre-colonial centralized homelands is explained by the legacy of location-specific factors related to the level of capacity that historically centralized states had in upholding authority and not necessarily through the legacy of better-quality local institutions. These results suggest that even though people in historically centralized parts of Uganda have mistrust towards the central government and public institutions, they may be willing to follow rules and pay taxes when they live in a setting with higher interpersonal trust. Social and economic policies to increase trust in public institutions can therefore help further increase tax compliance in Uganda. Though Uganda offers unique experiences, the empirical patterns we document may have broader empirical traction for other countries in Africa with centralized pre-colonial systems.