Electoral Administration in Fledgling Democracies: Experimental Evidence from Kenya

Abstract

We examine the effects of national voter registration policies on voting patterns with a large-scale experimental study. Together with Kenya's electoral commission, we designed an experiment in which 1,674 communities were randomized to a status quo or treatment group, receiving civic education on voter registration, SMS reminders about registration opportunities, and/or local registration visits by election commission staff. We find little evidence that civic education improves registration. Local registration visits improve voter registration, a relationship that increases in poorer communities. Moreover, local registration increased electoral competition and vote preference diversity in down-ballot contests in the 2017 Kenyan elections. Our results suggest that status quo voter registration policies constrain political participation and competition, and that inexpensive policy changes may attenuate the effects of such constraints.

Who Registers? Village Networks, Household Dynamics, and Voter Registration in Rural Uganda

“…Our study contributes sorely needed descriptive facts to a nascent literature exploring voter registration status, rather than turnout, in lower-income countries (Harris et al, 2021; Ichino & Schündeln, 2012; Mvukiyehe & Samii, 2017). It also complements a growing body of work examining the role of relational attributes in explaining political behavior.…”

“…Turning to the context of lower-income countries, Harris et al (2021) found that an intervention reducing the cost of registration in Kenya—conducting mobile registration rather than requiring citizens to register in-person—increased registration, particularly in poorer communities. However, this analysis was conducted at the aggregate rather than individual level.…”

“…While knowledge gaps exist with respect to voter registration in rich democracies, even less is known in lower-income countries. A recent study suggests that individual attributes such as poverty might make constituents more sensitive to registration costs (Harris et al, 2021), but basic descriptive facts about who registers to vote, and importantly, who remains unregistered , are elusive. A vexing problem is the lack of reliable data about the population of adults eligible to vote—a challenge that is particularly severe in lower-income countries where census data are collected infrequently and are of variable quality (Lee & Zhang, 2017).…”

Can low-cost, scalable, online intervention increase youth informed political participation in electoral authoritarian contexts?

“…Younger citizens (y-axis) have lower turnout rates compared to older citizens (x-axis), especially so in non-democracies (right panel). This figure reports survey estimates of youth (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34) and adult (35+) turnout from the most recent election for which sufficiently high-quality data is available. Democracies are those countries that have a Polity-V score above 5.…”

“…This, we suspect, might be because the implementation of the registration treatment was somewhat convoluted. Indeed, unlike some past studies (e.g., 19), we were not allowed to interface directly with the state's voter registration system.…”