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Papers in the burgeoning empirical literature on distributive politics often focus their analysis on the pattern of distribution of a single patronage good—for example, cash transfers, roads, education spending, electrification, or targeted grants. Yet because governments can favor constituencies through the targeting of multiple public and private goods, drawing general conclusions about distributive politics by investigating just one (or even a few) good(s) can be misleading. We demonstrate the severity of this problem by investigating a particular manifestation of distributive politics—ethnic favoritism—in a particular setting—Africa—and show that the conclusions one draws about who benefits from government allocation decisions can vary markedly depending on the outcome one happens to study. Our findings suggest the need for caution in making general claims about who benefits from distributive politics and raise questions about extant theoretical conclusions that are based on empirical work that focuses on a single distributive outcome. The findings also provide a foundation for a new research agenda aimed at identifying the reasons why political leaders choose to favor their supporters with some public and private goods rather than others.

On 4 August 2010, Kenyans voted to adopt a new constitution, culminating a process that began as part of a resolution to the violent conflict that followed the December 2007 elections. By reducing executive power, devolving authority, and guaranteeing rights to women, minorities, and marginalized communities, the constitution has the potential to transform Kenyan politics. Political and logistical obstacles will, however, pose a challenge to implementation. Yet that the constitution has been adopted amidst a broader trend toward the institutionalization of political power in Africa—a context in which formal constitutional rules are increasingly consequential—provides cause for cautious optimism.

On 4 August 2010, Kenyans voted to adopt a new constitution, culminating a process that began as part of a resolution to the violent conflict that followed the December 2007 elections. By reducing executive power, devolving authority, and guaranteeing rights to women, minorities, and marginalized communities, the constitution has the potential to transform Kenyan politics. Political and logistical obstacles will, however, pose a challenge to implementation. Yet that the constitution has been adopted amidst a broader trend toward the institutionalization of political power in Africa—a context in which formal constitutional rules are increasingly consequential—provides cause for cautious optimism.

AbstractPublic support is central to the emergence of judicial power. Conventional wisdom holds that citizen commitment to democracy and the rule of law sustains this support. An implication is that such commitments should protect courts from partisan backlash following contentious rulings. But this remains largely untested. The Kenyan Supreme Court's historic 2017 elections rulings provide an unusual opportunity to test this expectation. After annulling the incumbent president's victory, the Court upheld his controversial repeat‐election win. With data from a national panel survey—conducted before and after the repeat election—we find important partisan‐based withdrawals/increases in judicial‐power support. There is no evidence that democratic principles attenuated partisan backlash; some were associated with its amplification. However, partisan losers maintain moderately high support despite backlash. Results advance debates about public support for judicial power and provide new evidence about public reactions to assertions of judicial authority in new democracies and electoral autocratic regimes.

AbstractIn theory, candidate debates can influence voters by providing information about candidates' quality and policy positions. However, there is limited evidence about whether and why debates influence voters in new democracies. We use a field experiment on parliamentary debates during Ghana's 2016 elections to show that debates improve voters' evaluations of candidates. Debates have the strongest effect on partisan voters, who becomemorefavorable toward and more likely to vote for opponent‐party candidates and less likely to vote for co‐partisans. Experimental and unique observational data capturing participants' second‐by‐second reactions to the debates show that policy information was the most important causal mechanism driving partisan moderation, especially among strong partisans. A follow‐up survey shows that these effects persist in electorally competitive communities, whereas they dissipate in party strongholds. Policy‐centered debates have the potential to reduce partisan polarization in new democracies, but the local political context conditions the persistence of these effects.

This article demonstrates that ethnic segregation is a key determinant of local public goods provision. We argue that this results from politicians' strategic engagement in ethnic favoritism: Only when ethnic groups are sufficiently segregated can elites efficiently target coethnics with local public goods. We test this expectation with fine-grained data from Malawi on the spatial distribution of ethnic groups, geolocated distributive goods (water wells), and the ethnic identities of political elites. We find that members of parliament provide more local public goods to their electoral districts when ethnic groups are geographically segregated but that this increased investment is primarily targeted toward coethnics. Thus, while segregation promotes overall public goods provision, it also leads to greater favoritism in the distribution of these goods. Our logic and evidence provide an elite-driven explanation for both the considerable variation in ethnic favoritism across contexts and the underprovision of public goods in ethnically diverse settings.

AbstractThe impact of urban migration on ethnic politics is the subject of long‐standing debate. "First‐generation" modernization theories predict that urban migration should reduce ethnic identification and increase trust between groups. "Second‐generation" modernization perspectives argue the opposite: Urban migration may amplify ethnic identification and reduce trust. We test these competing expectations with a three‐wave panel survey following more than 8,000 Kenyans over a 15‐year period, providing novel evidence on the impact of urban migration. Using individual fixed effects regressions, we show that urban migration leads to reductions in ethnic identification; ethnicity's importance to the individual diminishes after migrating. Yet urban migration also reduces trust between ethnic groups, and trust in people generally. Urban migrants become less attached to their ethnicity but more suspicious. The results advance the literature on urbanization and politics and have implications for the potential consequences of ongoing urbanization processes around the world.

Scholars argue that access to information about a politician's programmatic performance helps voters reward good performers and punish poor ones. But in places where resources are made conditional on collective electoral behavior, voters may not want to defect to vote for a strong legislative performer if they do not believe that others will. We argue that two conditions must hold for information about politician performance to affect voter behavior: Voters must care about the information and believe that others in their constituency care as well. In a field experiment around legislative elections in Benin, voters rewarded good programmatic performance only when information was both made relevant to voters and widely disseminated within the electoral district. Otherwise, access to positive legislative performance information actually lowered vote share for the incumbent's party. These results demonstrate the joint importance of Salience and voter coordination in shaping information's impact in clientelistic democracies.

AbstractThis short report exploits a unique opportunity to investigate the implications of response bias in survey questions about voter turnout and vote choice in new democracies. We analyze data from a field experiment in Benin, where we gathered official election results and panel survey data representative at the village level, allowing us to directly compare average outcomes across both measurement instruments in a large number of units. We show that survey respondents consistently overreport turning out to vote and voting for the incumbent, and that the bias is large and worse in contexts where question sensitivity is higher. This has important implications for the inferences we draw about an experimental treatment, indicating that the response bias we identify is correlated with treatment. Although the results using the survey data suggest that the treatment had the hypothesized impact, they are also consistent with social desirability bias. By contrast, the administrative data lead to the conclusion that the treatment had no effect.