What Drives the Swing Voter in Africa?

Abstract

What makes African voters "up for grabs"? Existing approaches to the swing voter have several liabilities. This article introduces a new measure enabling a more comprehensive assessment of swing voting, including the differentiation between clientelistic and collective goods motivations. The issue of swing voting is then brought to an environment where voters are rarely considered persuadable: Africa. Using a count-model estimation technique and original survey data from Ghana's critical 2008 elections, the analysis challenges the near consensus in African politics on clientelism as the only electoral strategy. When voters perceive politicians as providing collective, developmental goods, the efficacy of clientelism as a tool to win over voters is reduced. Many persuadable voters can also be won over by both clientelistic and collective goods, thus contradicting the literature presenting these as mutually exclusive. Finally, the analysis shows that incumbents do better when they provide collective goods even in highly clientelistic environments. W hat makes voters "up for grabs" in elections? The question of how parties and candidates win over persuadable voters has received extensive attention in competitive elections and developed democracies around the world. This article brings the literature to the context of a new democracy in Africa-a continent where political competition exists alongside widespread clientelism, poor developmental performance, and programmatically weak parties (van de Walle 2003). Voters in these emerging democracies are typically assumed to vote based on ethnic cleavages (e.g.

Fertilizer and votes: Does strategic economic policy explain the 2009 Malawi election?

“…However, in this case Youde (2005: 13) notes that regionalism, ethnicity and partisan identification still had a more significant impact upon the electorate. 5 Weghorst and Lindberg (2013) also consider the Ghanian case and, like Youde (2005), find evidence that both performance and patronage influence the swing voter.…”

“…Stasavage (2005), Grepin and Dionne (2013), and Harding and Stasavage (2014) all highlight the difficulty of "weak" African democracies providing public goods, where "weakness" may stem from their youth (Keefer, 2007) or their aid dependence (Author, 2014). The distinction between clientalistic and public goods as a motivating factor is also addressed by Weghorst and Lindberg (2013) who find that when voters perceive politicians to be providing public goods the importance of private goods provision diminishes.…”

“…We would then expect that regions that were disproportionately targeted by the FSP would reward the DPP in the 2009 election. Again drawing on Weghorst and Lindberg (2013), we expect this support to be based both on the "clientalistic" motivation of FSP receipt, but also on a motivation from a positive evaluation of the broader effectiveness of the FSP program as a national policy aimed at providing the collective good of food security. 6 We formally outline the allocation decision below, and then test a statistical model that maps these basic primitives into the allocation of the FSP and vote-outcomes.…”

“…As such, we would expect strong affinity (a disutility δ ≤ 0) from the Southern tribes, the Lomwe 11 We also think it is plausible that political actors in Malawi would be aware of these levels of ethnic salience, both because the AfroBarometer is a widely known and cited instrument but also through an "intuitive" knowledge of ethno-regional partisanship. Weghorst and Lindberg (2013) also make an implicit assumption that political actors are aware of which voters are "up for grabs". and Nyanga, which would enable the DPP to avoid allocating resources to areas dominated by these ethnicities.…”

Ethnic Politics and Women's Empowerment in Africa: Ministerial Appointments to Executive Cabinets

“…Autonomous women's associations, in particular, have helped to increase the supply of potential cabinet appointees in African countries by enabling women activists to develop national reputations for promoting greater transparency in government institutions and greater equity in access to public services (Fallon 2008;Tripp, Konaté, and Lowe-Morna 2006). And women with reputations as reform advocates or policy experts have become valuable cabinet appointees for incumbents intent on signaling their commitment to reform in African countries where policy performance increasingly matters in electoral competition (Basedau and Stroh 2012;Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi 2005;Weghorst and Lindberg 2013). For example, in Uganda, women's rights activist Miria Matembe, an outspoken critic of corruption, was appointed to lead the Ministry for Ethics and Integrity.…”