Jamie Hintson

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2022 - 2023 Academic Year

Potemkin State-Building: Understanding State Expansion in Contemporary Africa

Existing research tends to characterize state services as perennially distant from the rural African population. Data from satellite imagery, however, shows strong growth and convergence in the presence of public service delivery infrastructure in remote areas throughout the continent. But this new infrastructure is often 'hollow,' lacking adequate staff and supplies. This project seeks to explain why states engage in patterns of predictably hollow infrastructure construction, even when hollow facilities are costly to construct, draw voters' ire, and display government waste. I combine electoral data with interviews and surveys in Uganda to unpack the political logics of 'Potemkin' state expansion.

Jamie Hintson, Department of Political Science 

Jamie Hintson is a PhD candidate in political science at Stanford University. Hinston research interests include the politics of state-building, service delivery, and development. His dissertation studies patterns of public service expansion into rural regions of Africa, combining remotely sensed data with qualitative and quantitative fieldwork in Uganda. Hintson received his BA in politics from Princeton University in 2018. From 2018 to 2019 he served as a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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