The extent and intent to which Africans use their right to vote is of paramount importance to the success of democratization. If, as many experts argue, political participation in Africa is a continuation of cultural and historical patronage linkages between politicians and citizens, democracy, especially voting, is mere window dressing. If politicians pay voters to turn out and vote for them, or if they persuade co-ethnics to vote for them with promises of enrichment and prosperity once elected, citizens may be free, but their country is not a competitive democracy. This dissertation examines voting behavior, including why citizens turnout and who they vote for, in nine Sub-Saharan African democracies. While conventional wisdom suggests that ethnicity and clientelism explain voting in Africa, individual-level evidence suggests that these explanations may not predict turnout and choice in African democracies. Voting behavior in Africa is addressed using two methodologies, structured experiments and analysis of cross-national survey data.
The most innovative aspect of this project is the use of experimental research techniques to understand voting behavior in Africa. This experiment uses a game commonly employed in economic experiments, the Ultimatum Game, to examine how individuals choose between alternatives that represent competing theories of vote choice in Africa, including ethnicity, vote buying, corruption, and accountability. It extends the work of Inman and Andrews (2008), which finds that citizens are more likely to participate when they perceive their government as corrupt. Thus, accountability plays a much greater role than traditional theory would suggest. With results from experiments carried out in Senegal and Ghana, it will be possible to investigate both turnout and vote choice at the individual level, in particular, how an individual's voting behavior is influenced by their evaluation of governmental performance, as opposed to traditional factors such as ethnic ties. Survey results from nine African democracies and country-level factors, such as length of democracy, will be used to examine voting behavior, as well as to validate the experimental results. In combination, these methodologies will provide a rich picture of voting behavior in Africa's emerging democracies.
This work has broader implications for the study of modernization and democratization. Democratization has been slow to take hold in most African countries. Przeworski and Limongi (1997) find that democracy is almost never sustained in poor, underdeveloped countries. Given that most African countries can be characterized as poor and underdeveloped (e.g. see Easterly and Levine 1997), the weight of empirical evidence suggests that democracy will not be sustained in Africa. Yet, some African countries have made democratic transitions successfully, despite the predictions of the modernization theory of democracy. While these transitions have been studied at the institutional and elite level (e.g. Bratton and van de Walle 1997, Villalon and VonDoepp 2005), little attention has been paid to the role that citizens play in maintaining stable democracies. This project will evaluate the extent to which citizens make voting decisions based on evaluations of governmental performance, which may be directly related to the willingness of citizens to continue accepting the authority of democratic governments. One of the basic predictions of modernization theory is that education provides citizens the cognitive capacity to hold their leaders accountable. To the extent that Africans hold their leaders accountable, even without the resources and skills that modernization theory would predict, we have a basis of comparison between voters in non-industrialized and industrialized countries. Thus, the project has the potential to enhance understanding of voting behavior in industrialized vs. non-industrialized countries.
