Why does electoral clientelism persist when ballots are secret and elections are competitive? The provision of material rewards during campaigns is seen as the standard way politicians secure votes in ‘patronage democracies’. Yet monitoring clientelistic bargains is difficult when voting is secret, several competitors may provide material inducements simultaneously, voters view such inducements as gifts and not obligations, and candidates' records are more credible signals of future performance. I argue that where elections are competitive and voters expect gifts, candidates engage in a two-pronged strategy: affirm their own status through public displays of wealth, and undermine opponents' rewards by matching inducements or encouraging voters to break reciprocity norms. In result, neither side's gifts are sufficient for a win, and parties are forced to pursue different linkage mechanisms to voters. One such mechanism involves defining and targeting broader constituencies through policy proposals. Micro-level data from Ghana confirm these expectations. The theory is better suited to environments where candidates' past records are known to constituents than existing explanations, and accounts for the apparent contradiction between the ubiquity of campaign clientelism in Sub-Saharan Africa and recent empirical findings that performance evaluations and non-contingent incentives matter most to voters.

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Could there be coattail effects in the absence of strong parties? How would these effects manifest in countries with ethnic and personality-based politics? Kenya's 2017 election presents an opportunity for a theoretical and empirical contribution to the study of coattail effects in such settings. With the newly-created and highly attractive positions of county governors, down-ticket races became a lot more competitive, forcing parties to make difficult choices in terms of campaign focus, the apportioning of resources across the ballots, and how to maintain or forge alliances with local leaders whose networks were key to success in the battlegrounds. Presidential candidates found themselves in a precarious position: endorsing governor aspirants in competitive races could lead to a backlash and cost them votes, failure to endorse could signal lack of confidence in key figures and thus potentially jeopardize all six positions on the ballot. This paper draws on theories of coattail effects in democracies and adapts them to better understand the relationship between the races for governor and president in Kenya's 2017 election. I argue that coattail effects are conditional on governors receiving clear and public endorsements by the presidential candidates and that effects flow from presidential candidates to governor aspirants in parties' strongholds, and vice-versa in battleground counties. The incumbent Jubilee party was better able to harness gubernatorial coattail effects because of its ability to field single candidates and entice popular local leaders to either join the ticket or stand down in favour of ticket holders. The findings have broader implications for theories of coattail effects, campaign strategy, legislative fragmentation, and citizen-politician linkages in settings with personality-based politics and weaklyinstitutionalised parties.

Unlike existing approaches to the study of ethnic politics, this article argues that the political competition for ethnic votes in modern democracies is programmatic (i.e. distinguishable by its focus on issues and policies), much like the competition for voting blocs defined as based on class or gender. Analysing ethnic appeals in this manner makes them suitable for the type of quantification and comparative analyses now standard in the estimations of policy positions on a range of other issues. Once the policy concerns of ethnic communities are known, scaling and scoring them becomes possible, paving the way for quantification and rigorous comparative work. Drawing on content analysis of speeches and manifestos delivered in democracies over the past decades, the article identifies a list of political positions reflective of appeals made to ethnic communities. Further, it derives and validates two indices of ethnic campaigning using data from the Comparative Manifestos Project. The measures are shown to be more robust and sensitive to nuance than existing classifications and can be readily applied to testing various hypotheses regarding the political competition for ethnic votes in democracies.