Dissertation Project

Voting for Development. Identity, Poverty, and Retrospective Accountability in Africa’s Democracies.

PhD-Thesis by Simon Primus, University of Munich (LMU). Supervision: Prof. Dr. Paul W. Thurner, Prof. Dr. Nicole Bolleyer.

In recent decades, democratic elections have become the prime mode to select national leaders in Africa. But will electoral competition improve the region’s developmental record? A key factor is voting behaviour. People can stimulate developmental investment and a common-good-oriented distribution of state resources by sanctioning poor management and voting out bad leaders. Tracing this argument, my dissertation investigates to what extent voting is guided by the incumbent’s management of developmental key areas in a survey-based comparative analysis of 16 sub-Saharan countries. The results show that, at least in Africa’s more competitive systems, vote choices are closely linked to evaluations of government performance. Against conventional expectation, it is especially poorer people who defect from ethnic and partisan political allegiances if they are dissatisfied with the government’s handling of developmental responsibilities. Exposure to poverty directly informs government ratings and translates into oppositional votes. Another exciting finding is that national partisan identities increasingly transcend particularistic ethnic alignments. Strong and stable partisan biases in popular evaluations indicate long-term psychological ties between voters and parties. However, the study’s comparative cross-country perspective also reveals that the strength of performance voting and the relevance of ethnic and partisan identities vary substantially across the continent. Contradictory accounts of voting behaviour in Africa are often a matter of case selection.

Photos: Election posters (left) and fisher boats with party flags (right) in Accra, Ghana, 2020/2016. © Primus.