Colonialism and Institutional Persistence: Mixed Legislative Legacies in Ghana and Kenya

A large literature investigates the institutional legacies of European colonialism around the world. However, in linking contemporary outcomes to colonial antecedents, most works seldom identify specific institutions or their temporal evolution. This paper examines the institutional legacies of colonialism in Africa through the lens of colonial legislatures. Cross-country analyses show that the correlation between colonial antecedents and contemporary measures of legislative strength is tenuous and sensitive to measurement. A comparative study of legislative development in Ghana and Kenya explains the mixed legacies of colonial legislatures. Beyond colonial institutional design, temporal variation in intra-legislative factional politics explains legislative development in the two countries. This article highlights the importance of understanding the specific mechanisms behind colonial institutional persistence and change.

Traditional Institutions in Africa, Past and Present

To what degree and why are traditional institutions persistent? Following up on the literature on the long-term effects of precolonial institutions in Africa, we investigate whether today's traditional institutions mirror their precolonial predecessors. We link new data on traditional institutions of African ethnic groups with Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas. We find a robust association between past and present levels of centralization. However, this persistence originates almost exclusively from former British colonies governed with more reliance on precolonial institutions than other colonies, in particular French ones. These findings contribute to research on the development and effects of traditional institutions, highlighting the need to theoretically and empirically differentiate between what we call institutional persistence and persistent effects of past institutions.

Institutional Persistence: Involvements with Child Protective Services, the Criminal Justice System, and Mental Health Services across Childhood, Adolescence, and Early Adulthood in Denmark

The pairwise overlaps in system involvement between child protective services, mental health services, and the criminal justice system is well-documented. Yet, less is known about how contact to these three systems evolves as children age, and how children’s trajectories through these institutions should be conceptualized. In this article, we use administrative data on the full population of Danish children born 1982-1995 that had contact to at least one of three systems before turning 21. Theoretically, we argue that children’s trajectories of institutional contacts can be understood as a moral career as suggested by Goffman (1959). Empirically, we study how children move between and are retained within the three systems across childhood. We find that early contact originates with child protective services but branch out through both overlap and transitions to the other systems. Further, across age there is high levels of retention within the systems, and clear gendered dynamics play out as children age. We argue that children’s trajectories across age can be viewed as moving from a position as a subject at risk to a position as subject of risk.

Examining healthcare institutions by bringing qualitative data from two eras into empirical dialogue

In this paper, we argue that there is new insight to be gained by reexamining the classic text, Boys in White, in strategic ways. Specifically, we share excerpts from Boys in White with current medical students and ask for their reactions in qualitative interviews, examining the relevance (or lack thereof) of earlier meanings about professional training for current processes of professional training. We show how we have employed this technique in our current project revisiting Boys in White with current medical students, and discuss preliminary findings that reveal the potential of this technique for documenting evidence of macro-level forces in healthcare institutions using qualitative data on new doctors. We conclude with discussion of alternative approaches through which scholars could make use of this technique in future professional socialization scholarship that could shed light on dynamics of institutional persistence and change.