Recent research suggests that intimidating voters and electoral clientelism are two strategies on the menu of manipulation, often used in conjunction. We do not know much, however, about who is targeted with which of these illicit electoral strategies. This article devises and tests a theoretical argument on the targeting of clientelism and intimidation across different voters. We argue that in contexts where violence can be used to influence elections, parties may choose to demobilize swing and opposition voters, which frees up resources to mobilize their likely supporters with clientelism. While past research on this subject has either been purely theoretical or confined to single country studies, we offer a first systematic cross-national and multilevel analysis of clientelism and voter intimidation in seven African countries. We analyze which voters most fear being intimidated with violence and which get targeted with clientelistic benefits, combining new regional-level election data with Afrobarometer survey data. In a multilevel analysis, we model the likelihood of voters being targeted with either strategy as a function of both past election results of the region they live in and their partisan status. We find that voters living in incumbent strongholds are most likely to report having being bribed in elections, whereas those living in opposition strongholds are most fearful of violent intimidation. We further provide suggestive evidence of a difference between incumbent supporters and other voters. We find support that incumbent supporters are more likely to report being targeted with clientelism, and mixed support for the idea that they are less fearful of intimidation. Our findings allow us to define potential hot spots of intimidation. They also provide an explanation for why parties in young democracies concentrate more positive inducements on their own supporters than the swing voter model of campaigning would lead us to expect.

Does more media censorship imply more regime stability? We argue that censorship may cause mass disapproval for censoring regimes. In particular, we expect that censorship backfires when citizens can falsify media content through alternative sources of information. We empirically test our theoretical argument in an autocratic regime—the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Results demonstrate how exposed state censorship on the country's emigration crisis fueled outrage in the weeks before the 1989 revolution. Combining original weekly approval surveys on GDR state television and daily content data of West German news programs with a quasi‐experimental research design, we show that recipients disapproved of censorship if they were able to detect misinformation through conflicting reports on Western television. Our findings have important implications for the study of censoring systems in contemporary autocracies, external democracy promotion, and campaigns aimed at undermining trust in traditional journalism.

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