Abstract

Across Africa, village chiefs are the foundation of village-level pol- itics. They are typically older and, as a consequence, less educated. This, along with concerns of despotism, has led to initiatives aimed at empowering younger individuals or creating committees that provide checks on the village chief. We study the consequences of these efforts, explicitly accounting for the fact that the effects of empowering younger cohorts are likely contingent on the underlying social structure of the village. Particularly relevant is that across Africa, age sets, which comprise initiation rituals for young men, are common. A documented consequence of age sets is that they generate a balance of power by creating a cohesive group of young men that provides a check on older political elites. Our study, working within a randomized intervention, shows that the effects of empowering young men and checking the power of the chief depend critically on the underlying social structure of the village – namely, whether age sets are present. In villages with age-set institutions, young male com- mittees report greater cohesion and engage in more oversight, and product allocations are less tilted toward chiefs and other advantaged households. In villages without age sets, the same committee assignment does not generate these accountability gains and can worsen elite capture. Across groups, we find little evidence of changes in overall coverage or average health outcomes, suggesting that the main effects operate through distribution and constraints on capture rather than aggregate provision. Thus, we find that in a gerontocratic setting such as ours, empowering young men can backfire, especially if social structures that unify young men – namely, age sets – are not present.