Jeffrey Conroy-Krutz—Urban & Rural Voting Project

Photo: Urban “campaign communication,”

Saint-Louis, Sénégal

Project Overview:

Observations of recent elections in many sub-Saharan African countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Sénégal, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, suggest a pattern in which voters in urban areas are less likely than their counterparts in rural areas to support incumbent parties and candidates. This pattern has been unexplored in the literature on party systems, elections, and political behavior in sub-Saharan Africa, and the dominant theories on incumbent duration in the region suffer limitations in their ability to address these observations. In fact, this recent pattern is somewhat surprising, given that the modus operandi of ruling parties throughout the continent in much of the post-independence period seemed to be to maintain support among urban populations, while practicing divide-and-conquer strategies and over-taxation in rural zones.

The goals of this project are examine cross-country and longitudinal variations in urban-rural cleavages in African electoral politics, and develop (and later test) potential explanations for these observed patterns.

General comments welcome [e-mail: jkk2003@columbia.edu]

Associated Research Projects

“African Cities and Incumbent Hostility: Explaining Opposition Success in Urban Areas” [pdf]

Abstract: After highlighting the recent patterns of incumbent underperformance in urban, vis-à-vis rural, areas in recent African elections—with more in-depth attention to recent elections in Ethiopia, Ghana, Sénégal, Zambia, and Uganda—I present three possible explanations for this pattern. First, Structual Adjustment has resulted in economic policies that have reduced “urban bias,” and contributed to a decline of standards of living in urban areas, vis-à-vis rural ones. Second, I argue that participation buying, a strategy more common among (comparatively) resource-rich ruling parties, is more efficacious in rural areas, where voters are poorer (read: their “selling price” is lower) and their behaviors easier to monitor (due to stronger interpersonal networks and a less severe ecological inference problem). Finally, I point out that resource-strapped opposition parties have greater incentives to campaign in urban areas, where they can reach a larger number of voters more efficiently. I find additional support for these points in my observations of parties’ behavior and voters’ attitudes during the 2007 National Assembly elections in Sénégal.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the African Studies Association meeting (San Francisco, November 2006)

Revise and resubmit to Comparative Politics (December 2007)

Comments welcome [e-mail: jkk2003@columbia.edu]

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