Pathways of Electoral Clientelism in University Student Elections in Ghana: An Exploratory Study

Recent studies on student politics and governance have shown that electoral clientelism (EC) in university student elections is often facilitated by clientelist relations between student leaders and political parties. However, there is a dearth of empirical research investigating the various forms of electoral clientelism, as manifested through vote-buying practices in campus electoral politics in African universities. This article, therefore, investigates the multifaceted and changing dynamics of vote-buying in student electoral processes in Ghanaian universities. The study adopted a qualitative approach based on semi-structured interviews with 15 student leaders, 4 university staff working with student leadership, and 4 focus group interviews involving students at the University of Ghana and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. From our finding, we argue that electoral clientelism takes place in five crucial ways in university student elections in Ghana. These include the provision of direct cash payments, exchanging electoral support for student government positions and appointments, provision of food and beverage consumables, award of student-related business contracts, and provision of educational materials and souvenirs.

Rejecting Ethnic Pandering in Urban Africa: A Survey Experiment on Voter Preferences in Nairobi, Kenya

Ethnic pandering, in which candidates promise to cater to the interests of coethnic voters, is presumed to be an effective strategy for increasing electoral support in Africa’s emerging multiethnic democracies. However, ethnic political mobilization may be disdained by citizens for its divisive and polarizing effects, particularly in urban areas. As a result, pandering may fall on deaf ears among Africa’s urban voters. This study examines how voters in Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi, respond to ethnic pandering using data from a vignette experiment conducted in 2015 and a replication study implemented in 2016. Results show that respondents are more supportive of candidates who make ethnically inclusive rather than targeted appeals, regardless of whether the candidate is identified as a coethnic. We propose that the results are driven by a broad distaste among urban voters for parochial politics, rather than by strategic calculations related to candidate viability.

Liberalism

Chapter 8 argues that liberal values of freedom and equality not only form the basis for social justice (as argued in Chapter 4), but shared liberal values also provide a social basis for trust, solidarity, and egalitarian redistribution. More specifically, it is argued that shared liberal values have positive institutional, distributive, and direct value effects on social cohesion. Rawls made similar claims, but here a more thorough argument is provided. First, shared liberal values facilitate electoral support for universal, social democratic welfare states, which are conducive to institutional and generalized trust and redistributive solidarity. Second, shared liberal values facilitate electoral support for egalitarian redistribution, where socio-economic equality tends to promote trust and solidarity. And third, shared liberal values have direct value effects, where people who share such values tend to have a more inclusive conception of their in-group, and extend their trust and solidarity to, for example, immigrants.

Clientelism and development: Vote-buying meets patronage

Offering employment in the public sector in exchange for electoral support (patronage politics) and vote-buying are clientelistic practices frequently used by political machines. In the literature, these practices are typically studied in isolation. In this paper, we study how the interaction between these two practices (as opposed to having just one tool) affects economic development. We present a theoretical model of political competition, where, before the election, the incumbent chooses the level of state investment that can improve productivity in the private sector. This decision affects the income levels of employees in the private sector, and, thereby, the costs and effectiveness of vote-buying and patronage. We show that when the politician can use both clientelistic instruments simultaneously, his opportunity cost for clientelism in terms of foregone future taxes declines. As a result, the equilibrium amount of public investment is typically lower when both tools are available than otherwise.

How Open Lists Undermine the Electoral Support of Cohesive Parties

How does ballot structure affect party choice? We argue that open lists undermine the electoral support of cohesive parties, to the benefit of internally divided parties. We conduct a survey-embedded experiment in the aftermath of the European migrant crisis, presenting German voters with real parties but fictitious politicians. A crossover design varies ballot type and exposure to candidate positions on immigration. We find that the internally divided Christian Democrats gain votes at the expense of the cohesive Alternative for Germany when open lists are used and candidate positions are known. For individuals who are equally attracted to both parties, switching is most likely if their immigration preferences lie near the midpoint between the two parties. Overall, our analysis establishes conditions under which ballot structure can affect the electoral performance of parties in general, and that of the populist right in particular.

Oil discoveries and political windfalls: Evidence on presidential support in Uganda

Oil discoveries, paired with delays in production, have created a new phenomenon: sustained post-discovery, pre-production periods. While research on the resource curse has debated the effects of oil on governance and conflict, less is known about the political effects of oil discoveries absent production. Using comprehensive electoral data from Uganda and a difference-in-difference design with heterogeneous effects, we show that oil discoveries increased electoral support for the incumbent chief executive in localities proximate to discoveries, even prior to production. Moreover, the biggest effects occurred in localities that were historically most electorally competitive. Overall, we show that the political effects of oil discoveries vary subnationally depending on local political context and prior to production, with important implications for understanding the roots of the political and conflict curses.

Electoral support and militants’ targeting strategies

Militant groups that are in armed conflict with a government often coexist with political parties that have ethnic or ideological connections to them. In this article, we explore the extent to which electoral support received by militant associated opposition parties and nationally incumbent political parties influences subnational variation in militant attacks. We argue, and empirically demonstrate, that militants strategically target localities where the levels of electoral support for the opposition party and the nationally incumbent party are close in an effort to negatively influence the electoral performance of the incumbent party. To illustrate this dynamic we examine subnational data from 1995 to 2015 Turkish legislative elections and attacks organized by the Kurdish militants within the same time period. We also examine the impact of June 2015 legislative elections on militant attacks until the snap elections in November 2015. Our empirical examination shows that militants target localities where electoral support for the governing party and Kurdish opposition party is close. Moreover, increase in violence negatively influences the electoral performance of the governing party. However, it does not consistently have a significant influence on the opposition. The findings illustrate that militants strategically choose the location of their attacks based on electoral dynamics, and attacks can pose an electoral challenge to the governing party.

The influence of mayors as candidates in the 2017 parliamentary elections on voter decision-making in Czechia

Local activities of electoral candidates represent one of the key factors influencing voting behaviour. Many studies have shown an elevated electoral support for candidates in the municipality of their residence and the surrounding region. By using the example of mayors who candidated in the 2017 Czech parliamentary elections, this article proves that this voting behaviour is manifested not only through the territorial concentration of preferential votes, but also through higher local electoral support of political parties represented by these candidates. This so-called friends and neighbours effect is stronger in smaller, less populous municipalities. Its spatial extent is not necessarily limited to the respective municipality, but if a well-known and popular mayor appears at the top of the regional candidate list, it can affect voters living many kilometers away, especially in non-metropolitan areas.

Violence and Voting in the United States: How School Shootings Affect Elections

How do citizens change their voting decisions after their communities experience catastrophic violent events? The literature on the behavioral effects of violence, on the one hand, and on political behavior, on the other, suggest different answers to this question. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we investigate the influence of indiscriminate, rampage-style school shootings on both voter turnout levels and the relative electoral support for the Democratic and Republican Parties at the county level in US presidential elections (1980–2016). We find that although voter turnout does not change, the vote share of the Democratic Party increases by an average of nearly 5 percentage points in counties that experienced shootings—a remarkable shift in an age of partisan polarization and close presidential elections. These results show that school shootings do have important electoral consequences and bring to the fore the need to further examine the effects of different forms of violence on political behavior.

The analysis of the dynamics of the electorate system by using q-distribution-a case study

In this work we study the system of the votes, the mechanism of the electoral support formation, and also the elements of its dynamics, by analyzing the data from several election processes in Albania. Firstly, we evidence the specific features and the characteristics of the distributions of votes through a descriptive approach, and next we use those findings to identify the nature of the elementary processes of the agreement, the defects of the system and dynamical issues. The distributions of the votes for the majority or majority-like election as by polling stations reference results a two-parts function. The part of the distribution located in the small vote fraction fits to a power law or to a q-exponential function, therefore the foremost factor of the electoral support for the subjects populating this zone is based in the preferential attachment rule, with some modification. Consequently, the small subjects or independent candidates, realize their electoral attractiveness based on the individual performance. Also, their voters act rationally and usually gather sufficient information before deciding to support them. The bell-shaped part of the distribution which describes the votes of the candidates of the main parties, fits better to the q-gaussian functions. In this case, electoral support is affected strongly by the political activists (militants) which harvest local influences to convict people producing an extra support for the candidates of big parties, regardless of their performance and electoral values. This physiognomy is characteristic for all legislative and administrative majority voting or other majority-like elections as practically behave the closed-lists elections of 2009, 2013, 2017 and also the semi-opened list of the 2021. The distributions of the closed-list votes in the administrative elections are mostly of the exponential or q-exponential type. Also, the distributions based on the data from electoral constituencies which include many polling stations resulted q-exponentials for all types of elections. We connected the q-exponential form of the distribution with the electoral network failures, system deficiencies and heterogeneity effects. In 2021, the distributions of the votes for subjects is obtained similar to the typical recent majority voting distribution, a mix of the power law and q-gaussian functions. The distribution of the votes for the candidates on the semi-open list for those elections resulted a mix of two q-exponentials. We associated this last with the difficulties of the voters to understand new electoral rules and additional other causes of the non-electoral nature. Also, the electorate network might have suffered extra irregularity issues due to the inadequate sizes of elections units, etc. The distributions of the votes for the two main parties are found q-gaussians with q ∼ 1.32 and q ∼ 1.57 for the right and the left wing respectively. Based on the non-stationarity level measured by the q-value, significant redistribution events are expected for the left-wing network, whereas the right-wing network would experience fewer changes in ceteris paribus socio-electoral conditions. Interestingly, the mix of the votes for two main political parties has produced a q-gaussian with q=1.004, and subsequently, the joint system is found in a more relaxed state. Therefore, the compound network including two main parties is likely to not undergo significant redistribution of the votes in the near future. This means that the small subjects or the fresh-born ones are not likely to cause changes on the system. Based on the deductions for electoral agreement formation, we used our recently introduced q-opinion approach to model the electoral opinion formation. In this model, the q-opinion produces an additional term that multiplies the modified preferential attachment probability for the link establishment. Herein, the q-parameter is calculated by using an ad-hoc formula involving the performance of the candidate as utility function, which associates the agreement behavior as the response, with the candidate performance as the offer or the cause factor. The quantity q henceforth acts as activation-inhibition switch of the extra utility involved in the q-opinion model, and particularly it provides a nonzero voter’s support for the high-performance opponent candidates. The model has reproduced the distributions analyzed in this study. It resulted that many voters in this electorate system act rationally, despite their affiliations.