Jamie Hintson
Graduate Student Research Funding | 2024–2025 Academic Year
Potemkin State-Building: Pathways to State Expansion in Contemporary Africa
African states have long been thought to target public goods toward leaders' ethnic groups and to underinvest in public infrastructure in rural hinterlands. This dissertation extracts data on public facility construction from satellite imagery covering 250,000 African villages, finding that most states have equitably expanded public infrastructure. Some of these states, however, have merely built hollow structures. This dissertation shows that corrupt elites construct hollow public infrastructure in order to embezzle public funds, targeting marginalized regions. Leaders then get away with hollow service delivery by convincing voters to instead blame local officials and service providers for leakages in service provision.
Jamie Hintson, Department of Political Science
Jamie Hintson is a PhD candidate in political science at Stanford University. Hintson's research focuses on the politics of development and public goods provision. 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.