Captured Countryside? Stability and Change in Sub-National Support for African Incumbent Parties

Abstract

Many existing accounts of African elections assume that voters base their electoral decisions on cues and incentives that are anchored in highly stable ethnic cleavage structures. Yet several newer contributions to the study of African electoral politics have questioned the ethno-clientelistic voting thesis and highlighted other determinants of vote choice, such as class, ideology and performance evaluation. Existing research has, however, not dealt with geographic dimensions of electoral dynamics. In this paper we contribute to this literature by studying Government-Opposition Swing (GOS) voting in 7 African countries, 28 elections and 1900 parliamentary constituencies. We show that the likelihood of GOS differs from urban to rural, and across different types of rural constituencies. GOS is significantly more common in urban areas and in highly populated rural areas, but significantly less common in the president's home region and in sparsely populated rural regions. The results suggest that electoral and voting dynamics vary across space, even within a single country. We draw inferences about how political and economic geography shapes prospects for autonomous vote choice and performance-related voting.

Social Inequalities and the Politicization of Ethnic Cleavages in Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal, 1999–2019

“…On the importance of the link between rural areas and incumbent parties, see for instanceWachman and Boone (2018).5 These findings resonate well with studies showing variations on reasons for supporting democracy or on trust in the government across social classes, for instanceMoehler (2005) andLetsa and Wilfahrt (2018).…”

Pre-election violence and territorial control: Political dominance and subnational election violence in polarized African electoral systems

“…However, these datasets are likely to bias results as they are more likely to pick up violence occurring in urban districts (von Borzyskowski & Wahman, forthcoming). Urban bias is particularly problematic given the hypotheses in this article because constituency-level population density in Africa is highly correlated with variables such as competition and ethnic fragmentation (Wahman & Boone, 2018). 11…”

Ethnofederalism and Ethnic Voting

“…First, a main motive for ethnic voting is that national leaders often favor coethnics in the allocation of publicly provided goods, such as education, health care, and roads (e.g., Franck and Rainer, 2012;Burgess et al, 2015;Kramon and Posner, 2016). Second, even when ethnic voting is common, candidate characteristics other than ethnicity (or the supply of information about these characteristics) matter too (e.g., Banerjee and Pande, 2007;Casey, 2015;Wahman and Boone, 2018). 17 Third, local ethnic diversity impedes the provision of local public goods (e.g., Miguel and Gugerty, 2005).…”