Do African Voters Favor Coethnics? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Benin

Adida, Claire L.

doi:10.1017/xps.2014.26

Cited by 54 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Second, it is beyond our scope to measure the direct impact of any one information signal (or its relative effects) that we uncover in the CIE on individuals' electoral behavior. Instead, our analysis of news coverage provides, at least in part, the type and concentration of heuristics that likely account for the full range of information content in CIE. We believe our study therefore also compliments an emerging literature that focuses on the relative salience of information signals on political behavior in developing democracies (e.g., Adida, 2015;Carlson, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Covering the Campaign: Computational Tools for Measuring Differences in Candidate and Party News Coverage with Application to an Emerging Democracy

Arnold¹,

Erlich²,

Jung³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Scholars debate whether and how campaigns influence political behavior and electoral outcomes. No consistent theoretical framework, however, defines, measures, and analyzes election-related content from within the media's coverage, particularly in emerging democracies. We apply machine learning techniques on texts from nearly 100,000 news articles during South Africa's 2014 election, and use a theoretically-informed classification of election coverage to demonstrate how the conceptual scope of elections shapes voters' campaign information environment. Our results produce distinct representations of political actors and institutions during elections: a narrow classification provides heuristics cuing race, party, and incumbent performance; a broad definition reflects policy and service concerns parties debated. Topic models and word vectors show that campaign content clusters with parties and their associations with government performance and policies, but candidates vary in how much distinct coverage they obtain on valence issues. We provide methods and evidence to replicably study electoral news coverage across developing countries.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Covering the Campaign: Computational Tools for Measuring Differences in Candidate and Party News Coverage with Application to an Emerging Democracy

Arnold¹,

Erlich²,

Jung³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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“…Benin’s political landscape is also characterized by ethnic voting (Adida, 2015; Dowd & Driessen, 2008; Koter, 2013; Wantchekon, 2003), a feature it shares with the political landscape of many, though certainly not all, other developing democracies. 27 Koter (2013) explains ethnic voting in Benin as a legacy of local leaders being either removed (if they resisted) or subdued by French colonizers, a legacy that weakened existing hierarchies and political organization, and left the country without traditional local elites to cultivate future electoral mobilization strategies.…”

Section: Settingmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Does Information Influence Voters? The Joint Importance of Salience and Coordination

Adida

Gottlieb

Kramon

et al. 2019

Comparative Political Studies

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Scholars argue that access to information about a politician’s programmatic performance helps voters reward good performers and punish poor ones. But in places where resources are made conditional on collective electoral behavior, voters may not want to defect to vote for a strong legislative performer if they do not believe that others will. We argue that two conditions must hold for information about politician performance to affect voter behavior: Voters must care about the information and believe that others in their constituency care as well. In a field experiment around legislative elections in Benin, voters rewarded good programmatic performance only when information was both made relevant to voters and widely disseminated within the electoral district. Otherwise, access to positive legislative performance information actually lowered vote share for the incumbent’s party. These results demonstrate the joint importance of Salience and voter coordination in shaping information’s impact in clientelistic democracies.

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“…Voters also select on other characteristics, such as appearance (Atkinson, Enos, and Hill 2009) or ethnicity (Norris and Mattes 2003;Ferree 2006;Eifert, Miguel, and Posner 2010;Adida 2015). Ethnicity is likely a heuristic shortcut (Ferree 2006), and may even be a reasonable one, given that in some contexts ethnicity correlates with redistributive preferences (Pande 2003).…”

Section: Do Voters Care About Valence?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Progress and Perspectives in the Study of Political Selection

Bó¹,

Finan²

2018

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provided excellent research assistance. We are grateful to Kate Pennington and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

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Do African Voters Favor Coethnics? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Benin

Cited by 54 publications

References 28 publications

Covering the Campaign: Computational Tools for Measuring Differences in Candidate and Party News Coverage with Application to an Emerging Democracy

Covering the Campaign: Computational Tools for Measuring Differences in Candidate and Party News Coverage with Application to an Emerging Democracy

When Does Information Influence Voters? The Joint Importance of Salience and Coordination

Progress and Perspectives in the Study of Political Selection

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