Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T21:31:40.640Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Electoral clientelism as status affirmation in Africa: evidence from Ghana*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2017

Elena Gadjanova
Elena Gadjanova*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Hermann-Foege Weg 11, Goettingen 37073, Germany
*
Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Why does electoral clientelism persist when ballots are secret and elections are competitive? The provision of material rewards during campaigns is seen as the standard way politicians secure votes in ‘patronage democracies’. Yet monitoring clientelistic bargains is difficult when voting is secret, several competitors may provide material inducements simultaneously, voters view such inducements as gifts and not obligations, and candidates' records are more credible signals of future performance. I argue that where elections are competitive and voters expect gifts, candidates engage in a two-pronged strategy: affirm their own status through public displays of wealth, and undermine opponents' rewards by matching inducements or encouraging voters to break reciprocity norms. In result, neither side's gifts are sufficient for a win, and parties are forced to pursue different linkage mechanisms to voters. One such mechanism involves defining and targeting broader constituencies through policy proposals. Micro-level data from Ghana confirm these expectations. The theory is better suited to environments where candidates' past records are known to constituents than existing explanations, and accounts for the apparent contradiction between the ubiquity of campaign clientelism in Sub-Saharan Africa and recent empirical findings that performance evaluations and non-contingent incentives matter most to voters.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , December 2017 , pp. 593 - 621
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Funding for this research was provided by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. I would like to thank Isaac Yen, Norbert Winnige and Galina Novikova for research assistance. I am grateful to Karen Schönwälder, Godwin Onuoha, participants at the African Diversities colloquium in Göttingen and the Program for African Studies Open Seminar at Princeton, Ghadafi Saibu, Abdul-Kadri Alhassan, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors for constructive feedback.

References

REFERENCES

Austen, R. 1993. ‘The moral economy of witchcraft: an essay in comparative history’, in Comaroff, J.J., ed. Modernity and its Malcontents: ritual and power in postcolonial Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 89–110.Google Scholar
Bates, R. 1974. ‘Ethnic competition and modernization in contemporary Africa’, Comparative Political Studies 6, 4: 457–84.Google Scholar
Bayart, J.F. 1993. The State in Africa: the politics of the belly. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Berman, B.J. 1998. ‘Ethnicity, patronage and the African state: the politics of uncivil nationalism.’ African Affairs 97, 388: 305–41.Google Scholar
Bratton, M. 2008. ‘Vote buying and violence in Nigerian election campaigns’, Electoral Studies 27, 4: 621–32.Google Scholar
Campbell, A. 1980. The American Voter. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Chabal, P. & Daloz, J.P.. 1999. Africa Works: disorder as political instrument. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Easterly, W. & Levine, R.. 1997. ‘Africa's growth tragedy: policies and ethnic divisions’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, 4: 1203–50.Google Scholar
Englebert, P. 2002. State legitimacy and development in Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.Google Scholar
Fox, J. 1994. ‘The difficult transition from clientelism to citizenship: lessons from Mexico’, World Politics 46, 2: 151–84.Google Scholar
Gay, R. 2006. ‘The even more difficult transition from clientelism to citizenship: lessons from Brazil’, in Fernandez-Kelly, P. & Shefner, J., eds. Out of the Shadows: political action and the informal economy in Latin America. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 195–217.Google Scholar
Geer, J.G. 1991. ‘Do open-ended questions measure ‘salient’ issues?’, Public Opinion Quarterly 55, 3: 360–70.Google Scholar
Gonzalez-Ocantos, E., de Jonge, C., Meléndez, C., Osorio, J. & Nickerson, D. W.. 2012. ‘Vote buying and social desirability bias: experimental evidence from Nicaragua’, American Journal of Political Science 56, 1: 202–17.Google Scholar
Green, E. 2010. ‘Patronage, district creation, and reform in Uganda’, Studies in Comparative International Development 45, 1: 83–103.Google Scholar
Guardado, J. & Wantchekon, L.. 2014. ‘Do electoral handouts affect voting behavior?’, http://q-aps.princeton.edu/q-aps/files/VoteBuying_Rev030314.pdf.Google Scholar
Hansen, K.F. 2010. ‘Inside electoral democracy: gift-giving and flaunting in political campaigning in Cameroon’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 45, 4: 432–44.Google Scholar
Hoffman, B.D. & Long, J. D.. 2013. ‘Parties, ethnicity, and voting in African elections’, Comparative Politics 45, 2: 127–46.Google Scholar
Hyden, G. 2004. ‘Informal institutions, economy of affection, and rural development in Africa’, Tanzania Journal of Population Studies and Development 11, 2: 1–20.Google Scholar
Kelley, S. 1983. Interpreting Elections. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kitschelt, H. 2000. ‘Linkages between citizens and politicians in democratic polities’, Comparative Political Studies 33, 6–7: 845–79.Google Scholar
Kitschelt, H. & Wilkinson, S. I.. 2007. ‘Citizen-politician linkages: an introduction’ in Kitschelt, H. & Wilkinson, S., eds. Patrons, Clients, and Policies: patterns of democratic accountability and political competition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–49.Google Scholar
Kramon, E. 2010. ‘Why do politicians distribute gifts during campaigns? Survey experimental evidence from Kenya.’ http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1644093.Google Scholar
Kramon, E. 2013. ‘ Vote-buying and accountability in democratic Africa ’, PhD Dissertation, UCLA.Google Scholar
Lawson, C. & Greene, K. F.. 2014. ‘Making clientelism work: how norms of reciprocity increase voter compliance’, Comparative Politics 47, 1: 61–85.Google Scholar
Lemarchand, R. & Legg, K.. 1972. ‘Political clientelism and development: a preliminary analysis’, Comparative Politics 4, 149–78.Google Scholar
Lindberg, S.I. 2003. ‘‘It's our time to ‘Chop’: do elections in Africa feed neo-patrimonialism rather than counter-act it?’, Democratization 10, 2: 121–40.Google Scholar
Lindberg, S.I. 2010. ‘What accountability pressures do MPs in Africa face and how do they respond? Evidence from Ghana’, Journal of Modern African Studies 48, 1: 117–42.Google Scholar
Lindberg, S.I. 2013. ‘Have the cake and eat it: the rational voter in Africa’, Party Politics 19, 6: 945–61.Google Scholar
Lindberg, S.I. & Morrison, K. C.. 2008. ‘Are African voters really ethnic or clientelistic? Survey evidence from Ghana’, Political Science Quarterly 123, 1: 95–122.Google Scholar
Lonsdale, J. 1994. ‘Moral ethnicity and political tribalism’, in Kaarsholm, P. & Huttin, J., eds. Inventions and Boundaries: historical and anthropological approaches to the study of ethnicity and nationalism. IDS Occasional Paper No. 1, Roskilde University.Google Scholar
Lynch, G. 2008. ‘Moi: The making of an African ‘Big-Man’’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 2, 1: 18–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manning, C. 2005. ‘Assessing African party systems after the third wave’, Party Politics 11, 6: 707–27.Google Scholar
Muñoz, P. 2014. ‘An informational theory of campaign clientelism: the case of Peru’, Comparative Politics 47, 1: 79–98.Google Scholar
Nichter, S. 2008. ‘Vote buying or turnout buying? Machine politics and the secret ballot’, American Political Science Review 102, 1: 19–31.Google Scholar
Nichter, S. 2014. ‘Conceptualizing vote buying’, Electoral Studies 35: 315–27.Google Scholar
Nugent, P. 2001. ‘Winners, losers, and also-rans: money, moral authority and voting patterns in the Ghana 2000 election’, African Affairs 100: 405–28.Google Scholar
Nugent, P. 2007. ‘Banknotes and symbolic capital: Ghana's elections under the Fourth Republic’, in Basedau, M., Erdmann, G. & Mehler, A., eds. Votes, Money and Violence: political parties and elections in Sub-Saharan Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrika Institute and Scottsville: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press.Google Scholar
Olivier de Sardan, J.P. 1999. ‘A moral economy of corruption in Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies 37, 1: 25–52.Google Scholar
Sahlins, M.D. 1963. ‘Poor man, rich man, big-man, chief: political types in Melanesia and Polynesia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 5, 3: 285–303.Google Scholar
Shefter, M. 1977. Patronage and its Opponents: a theory and some European cases. 8. Western Societies Program, Center for International Studies, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Stokes, S.C. 2005. ‘Perverse accountability: a formal model of machine politics with evidence from Argentina’, American Political Science Review 99, 3: 315–25.Google Scholar
Vicente, P.C. 2014. ‘Is vote buying effective? Evidence from a field experiment in West Africa’, Economic Journal 124: 356–87.Google Scholar
Vicente, P.C. & Wantchekon, L.. 2009. ‘Clientelism and vote buying: lessons from field experiments in African elections’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy 25, 2: 292–305.Google Scholar
Wantchekon, L. 2003. ‘Clientelism and voting behavior: evidence from a field experiment in Benin’, World Politics 55, 3: 399–422.Google Scholar
Warner, C. M. 2001. ‘Mass parties and clientelism in France and Italy’, in Piattoni, S., ed. Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation: the European experience in historical and comparative perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 122–51.Google Scholar
Weghorst, K.R. & Lindberg, S.I.. 2011. ‘Effective opposition strategies: collective goods or clientelism’, Democratization 18, 5: 1193–1214.Google Scholar
Weghorst, K.R. & Lindberg, S.I.. 2013. ‘What drives the swing voter in Africa?’, American Journal of Political Science 57, 3: 717–34.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Gadjanova supplementary material

Gadjanova supplementary material 1

Download Gadjanova supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 316.5 KB