Political parties are often associated with particular ethnic groups, and ethnicity is a major influence when it comes to partisanship in sub-Saharan Africa. To account for this relationship, theories of instrumental ethnic voting propose that voters use the ethnic profile as an informational shortcut for the constituency of a candidate or party (Ichino, Nathan 2013). We hypothesize that ethnicity is a strong predictor of voter partisanship in developing countries. Study how local communities and geographic context can swing voter.
We contend that voters will favor a co-ethnic candidate because ethnicity will provide a signal about the candidates’ future behavior while in office. Ethnic fear, anxiety, and animosity are also factors that could cause voters to be perceived of negative consequences if governed under a different ethnicity (Hoffman, Long 2013). Thus causing a negative consequence for the candidate of a different ethnic group. These results hold important implications for understanding voting, parties, and government performance in multiethnic democracies.
It is argued that inchoate African parties have yet to divide along the lines of ideology. Thus making it extremely difficult for citizens to give commitments to a relative party (Hoffman, Long 2013). As result, parties are categorized as either, “mono-ethnic”, party leaders coming from a single ethnic group, or as a coalition of several ethnic leaders who share power (Kim 2017). Recent research has shown that an increasing number of African parties have formed a foundation on personalistic and non-ethnic matters, thus telling us that there is more than one dimension that matters to voters (Van de Wallet, 2014).
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According to the research of B. Hoffman and J. Long (2013), African parties are fairly young and prove to be fluid in both labels and membership. Second, because of information scarcities, assessing details about the candidates and their policies would be difficult for voters. Third, hegemonic parties in many countries left an imbalance in perceptions of credibility; opposition promises may ring hollow since they have rarely if ever held power.
Ethnic voting is often taken to be the most prevalent electoral behavior, however ethnic networks are insufficient in size. In a parties effort to construct a support base, candidates must attract support beyond their ethnic lineage. On account of the empirical evidence that was found, my hypotheses of rather or not ethnicity affects voter partisanship in African democracies remains unsupported.
When considering economic voting, a retrospective model where voters choose a party that best represents their economic interests. We can conclude that the incumbent would have the advantaged. Regardless of ethnicity, voters are more likely to re-elect and reward the incumbent who provided targeted state benefits (Weghorst, Lindberg 2012). Even though ethnicity seems is important among voters but it is insufficient when explaining the overall electoral winner.
Furthermore, performance is not simply endogenous to ethnicity, it does not consistently color perform evaluations beyond the incumbent’s co-ethnics, and such performance evaluations are not simply driven by local-level factors related to a person’s ethnic enclave. When taken together, we believe these results provide strong evidence that in addition to ethnicity, performance is an important and independent driver of voting behavior.
