Since 1990, there have been 133 presidential and 162 legislative elections in forty-five of Sub-Saharan Africa's forty-eight countries. Despite the frequency of these events, the periods that immediately precede them--electoral campaigns--have received relatively little attention from political scientists. And even fewer studies have examined how individual citizens respond to campaigns in Africa.
Democracy, of course, requires an engaged and informed citizenry, and the possibility for robust, public discussion of alternate policies and representatives. In the new, often struggling, and certainly imperfect democracies of Africa, it is especially important, therefore, to have the fullest possible understanding of the factors that impact societies' performance on these fronts. As essential institutions in democracies, election campaigns cannot be overlooked. Democracy promoters have focused extensively on ensuring that campaigns in developing democracies, such as those in Africa, facilitate open competition and are followed by cleanly conducted and peaceful elections. These efforts could be further enhanced by data on individual-level campaign effects, which this project will provide.
This project represents a distinctive attempt to identify and measure a broad range of campaign effects in African settings. Extant literature on the subject treats electoral campaigns in Africa as primarily mobilizational. In Africa, party loyalty is often held to be determined by ethnicity or patronage relationships between elites and their poorer clients. Therefore, parties' campaign-time challenge is to encourage those loyalists to turn out at the polls. This project seeks not only to measure these mobilizational effects--and to identify campaign activities that might be most important here--but also to measure two other, largely overlooked, potential campaign effects in Africa. First, the project hypothesizes that campaigns might have important persuasive effects, resulting in individuals switching or developing new loyalties. Second, campaigns might have informational effects; through campaign communications, citizens might gain important knowledge about candidates' and parties' political preferences, and about political institutions and democratic practices more generally. In sum, the project seeks to measure campaign effects on individual citizens.
The project's primary data-collection strategy involves a three-wave panel survey. Participants will be interviewed immediately prior to the launch of the campaign preceding Uganda's 2011 presidential and parliamentary elections. These same individuals will be interviewed again during the campaign, and then once more after the elections. Interviews will be conducted with approximately 1200 randomly selected citizens, from all of Uganda's regions and largest ethnic groups. Participants will answer questions about their exposure to campaign events and communications, including advertising; expectations for voting (in terms of whether they will turn out and, if so, which candidates they prefer); political attitudes on a number of issues; and level of political knowledge.
Re-interviewing the same individuals over time means that the project will be able to measure the extent to which individuals become more politically engaged and knowledgeable over the course of election campaigning. It will also allow the researcher to examine whether citizens enter the campaign period with pre-established and rigid political loyalties, which are unaffected by candidates' and parties' campaign activities, or whether some subset of the population can be "won over" during the campaign.
In sum, the findings of this project will facilitate further research in broad areas such as political party development, political communication and mass media, and electoral decision-making in developing democracies.
Since 1990, multiparty elections have been held in forty-five of Sub-Saharan Africa’s forty-nine countries. These elections include over 170 in which citizens have directly elected a president and over 200 for national legislatures. Despite elections’ frequency in Africa, relatively little systematic research has been conducted about the campaigns that precede them. In the weeks and months leading up to balloting, candidates and parties organize and advertise, often fervently, in order to maximize their vote totals. Candidates speak, distribute goods, and provide entertainment at rallies and marches; organize the faithful for local get-out-the-vote efforts; and craft exhortations for various media, ranging from radio and television spots. Democratic competition is hardly fathomable without such pre-election campaigning, yet political scientists know relatively little about the particular functions that such activities serve in Africa. Conventional wisdom holds that, since electoral behavior in Africa is driven primarily by ethnic considerations and long-standing clientelistic networks, campaigns are mainly designed to mobilize latent support. The existing literature has at least four significant shortcomings, however. First, it largely fails to examine variation in mobilizational strategies and their effectiveness. How do parties and candidates design strategies depending on target audiences and available resources? And how do voters vary in their responses to competitors’ efforts? Second, the notion that electoral campaigns in Africa are largely mobilizational in nature, rather than persuasive, is based on relatively little empirical evidence. In other words, to what extent do citizens’ electoral preferences shift during an electoral campaign? Third, the possibility that campaigns might have informational functions—i.e., improving citizens’ knowledge about candidates and political issues—remains unexplored. Finally, social scientists know little about how campaigns in places like Africa affect citizens’ perceptions of how democratic their countries are, or about how they affect demands for democracy. This project is the first of its kind to measure various types campaign effects in an African context. It studies campaign effects in a single country—Uganda—through a survey on presidential, parliamentary, and local elections, which took place in February and March of 2011. Nearly 1100 Ugandans in all regions of the country were interviewed near the outset of the official campaign period, in November 2010, to establish baseline attitudes and behaviors. These same individuals were re-contacted for interviews late in the campaign (late January/early February 2011) and then several weeks after the elections had taken place (late March/early April 2011). Nearly 700 individuals were interviewed in all three waves. Information on some 1100 variables was collected, with measures of hundreds of these variables collected two or more times during the period of study. Given the panel nature of the data, we can track how individuals’ attitudes and behaviors changed over the course of the campaign. Major findings of the study were as follows. First, the data suggest substantial potential persuasive effects of the 2010-11 campaign in Uganda. Four in ten respondents changed their presidential preference at least once during the study; in other words, many Ugandans’ political preferences were less than settled at the outset of the campaign, and campaign events and communications seem to have shaped their preferences. Second, the campaign seems to have had little mobilizational effect. Most respondents did not report any increases in political engagement over the course of the campaign; further, more reported decreased interest in politics over the course of the study than reported an increase. Third, the campaign does seem to have had modest informational benefits, in that large numbers displayed improved knowledge about political issues and institutions in Uganda at the end of the study period. Finally, the campaign and election itself seem to have done little to foster greater democratic citizenship amongst Ugandans. Support for and trust in a range of democratic institutions decreased among a large subset of the population; the number of individuals who professed greater support for and trust in these institutions was significantly smaller. And while individuals were more likely to increase their support for democracy vis-à-vis alternate regime types, such as single-party or military rule, large numbers also increased their support for the government clamping down on rights, such as freedom of speech and association. In short, the study found that Ugandans tended to be cognitively engaged in the campaign, in that they responded to campaign communications and events. Further, campaigns did seem to increase knowledge about politics. On a more pessimistic note, however, there is little evidence that the experience of the campaign habituated significant numbers into certain types of democratic behavior. And large numbers seem to have emerged from the campaign period more cynical about democracy and its prospects. This suggests that simply witnessing campaigns and electoral competition does not necessarily increase individuals’ support for democratic politics; rather, if individuals do not like what they witness, or find the process lacking, they might turn away from democratic participation.
