Zusammenfassung:
Levels of interpersonal income inequality in African countries are much higher than they were long assumed to be. The literature on politics in sub-Saharan Africa says little about the redistributive pressures arising from this, other than to argue that class politics is rarely observed in African countries and that clientelism prevails, short-circuiting the political mobilization of economic grievance. This paper highlights the fact that spatial or regional inequality is also very high in African countries and argues that this form of inequality is crucial in shaping the politics of redistribution. As argued in the literature on the political economy of spatial inequality, high levels of spatial inequality across subnational regions can impede the redistributive dynamics that, in a Kuznetsian world, could be expected to mitigate the extreme levels of inequality that we see across much of the African continent. Electoral geography analysis provides evidence of regionalism in national politics.