Identifying and Interpreting the Sensitivity of Ethnic Voting in Africa

Carlson, Elizabeth

doi:10.1093/poq/nfw034

Cited by 19 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…This vector is added to estimate the standard errors more efficiently and contains respondents’ ethnicity, sex, age, education, province of residence, rural residence, whether the respondent feels close to a party, the respondent’s experience of food shortages within the past year and experience of electoral violence since 1992. We also include the interviewers’ mother tongue (linked to ethnicity) and years of experience in the field, since these characteristics may shape respondents’ choices (Carlson, 2016). X also includes the district index of ethnolinguistic fractionalization proposed by Alesina et al (2003) and the polarization index proposed by Montalvo & Reynal-Querol (2003), since these indices might influence vote choice (Isaksson & Bigsten, 2017).…”

Section: Analysis and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This vector is added to estimate the standard errors more efficiently and contains respondents' ethnicity, sex, age, education, province of residence, rural residence, whether the respondent feels close to a party, the respondent's experience of food shortages within the past year, and experience of electoral violence since 1992. We also include the interviewers' mother tongue (linked to ethnicity) and years of experience in the field, since these characteristics may shape respondents' choices (Carlson, 2016).…”

Section: Conjoint Analysis Of the Two Ballotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This concern is seen across studies that suggest ethnic diversity explains Africa’s dismal economic performance and political instability (Easterly & Levine, 1997). Nonetheless, in countries where ethnicity strongly predicts voting, voters downplay concerns that ethnicity is driving their voting choices (Carlson, 2016). Instead, voters claim to focus on candidates’ qualities such as performance and honesty (Bratton & Kimenyi, 2008).…”

Section: Mobilizing Votersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Does electoral violence affect vote choice and willingness to vote? Conjoint analysis of a vignette experiment

Gutiérrez-Romero

LeBas

2020

Journal of Peace Research

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Across many new democracies, voters routinely elect candidates associated with violence. Though electoral violence is common, there is little understanding of how it affects voting behaviour. This article examines how electoral violence affects turnout and vote choice. To this end, a vignette experiment is set in a nationally representative survey in Kenya, where electoral violence has been present since the 1990s. In the experiment, voters choose between two rival politicians. The experiment randomizes candidates’ attributes, their rumoured use of electoral violence and their record of reducing poverty. Conjoint analysis is used to isolate the effects of the candidates’ randomized attributes on turnout and vote choice. In contrast to the assumptions made in the literature on electoral violence, voters are less likely to vote for candidates rumoured to have used electoral violence, even when the candidate is a coethnic or a copartisan. This sanctioning effect, however, is not consistent across all voters. Victims of electoral violence and the poorest respondents are less likely to sanction candidates rumoured to have used violence, especially when these candidates have a good record of reducing poverty. The results show that voting turnout decreases when participants are asked to choose between candidates who are rumoured to have used electoral violence. These results are robust to including respondent and interviewer characteristics that might have affected participation in the experiment and how respondents voted. These findings explain why candidates using violence can win elections and why electoral violence has been difficult to eradicate in settings characterized by clientelism and instances of political discourse justifying the use of violence.

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Section: Analysis and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conjoint Analysis Of the Two Ballotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mobilizing Votersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Does electoral violence affect vote choice and willingness to vote? Conjoint analysis of a vignette experiment

Gutiérrez-Romero

LeBas

2020

Journal of Peace Research

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“…Researchers investigated different aspects, such as the method of data collection (Blattman et al, 2016), the treatment of hard-to-measure concepts (Laajaj and Macours, 2017), the wording of the questions (Anker et al, 1987;Beaman and Dillon, 2012;Serneels et al, 2016;), questions placing within the survey questionnaire (Karlan and Zinman, 2012), and the length and level of detail of the questionnaire (Kalton and Schuman, 1982;de Mel, et al 2009;Beegle et al 2012;. Other studies look at how data quality is affected when household members report for others in the household (Bardasi et al, 2011), when the answers are to be reported publicly (Carlson, 2016), or when the repetition of surveys can be exhausting (Zwane et al, 2011). materialize because of enumerator behavior affecting non-response (Couper and Grove, 1992; West and Olson, 2010;Randall et al, 2013) or due to enumerator characteristics affecting the answers of the respondent (Brunton-Smith et al, 2017).…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Be Wary of Those Who Ask: A Randomized Experiment on the Size and Determinants of the Enumerator Effect

Maio

Fiala

2019

The World Bank Economic Review

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The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

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“… 2. My argument necessarily assumes that the incumbent party is more powerful than the opposition. This assumption rests largely on the observation that regimes that are liberal enough to allow a strong opposition to flourish are generally not those where we would expect voters to be so afraid of either party that they would strategically misreport their preferences (beyond the impacts of social desirability or enumerator effects (Adida et al, 2016; Carlson, 2016)). Where we expect substantial strategic misreporting, therefore, we should also expect this misreporting to favor the incumbent. …”

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confidence: 99%

The perils of pre-election polling: Election cycles and the exacerbation of measurement error in illiberal regimes

Carlson

2018

Research & Politics

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Pre-election polls are increasingly being used to forecast and study elections in new and weak democracies yet the tension that surrounds elections in less liberal regimes may make data from such surveys particularly prone to measurement error. Polls conducted before and after the 2011 Ugandan election and data gathered at various points of the election cycles in 34 African countries are compared to show that, before elections, survey respondents become increasingly wary of the interview and its purpose, especially in less liberal regimes. Those who are wary report more support for the incumbent, the incumbent's policies and the state and effect of wariness on attitudes is significantly higher on surveys that take place immediately before elections. Misreporting increases the estimated level of support for the incumbent, and may also significantly change the apparent correlates of regime support across the election cycle. Ironically, it was found that pre-election polls may be particularly poorly suited to forecasting elections or capturing the effects of campaigns on political attitudes.

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Identifying and Interpreting the Sensitivity of Ethnic Voting in Africa

Cited by 19 publications

References 39 publications

Does electoral violence affect vote choice and willingness to vote? Conjoint analysis of a vignette experiment

Does electoral violence affect vote choice and willingness to vote? Conjoint analysis of a vignette experiment

Be Wary of Those Who Ask: A Randomized Experiment on the Size and Determinants of the Enumerator Effect

The perils of pre-election polling: Election cycles and the exacerbation of measurement error in illiberal regimes

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