Beyond Ethnic Politics: The Limits of Bloc-Voting in Kenya
Posted: 18 Apr 2013 Last revised: 3 Jul 2013
Date Written: April 18, 2013
Abstract
The ‘ethnic census’ understanding of African elections asserts that voters support co-ethnic presidential candidates due to group identity and patronage politics. Yet in reality, few groups line up perfectly. In the ethnicly-charged 2013 Kenyan elections, for example, 100,000 Kikuyu voted for non-co-ethnics, and the Luhya and Kamba have repeatedly divided their vote. What explains variation in the propensity to bloc vote, both over time and between different communities? Drawing on historical analysis, focus groups, elite interviews and survey data, we show that four factors undermine bloc voting. First, communities with more than one presidential candidate are likely to be fragmented. Second, we find that cosmopolitan constituencies are less likely to bloc vote, while those with high in-group inequality are more likely to do so. Third, we find that larger communities are harder to uniformly mobilize than smaller ones due to collective action problems, resulting in fragmented voting. Fourth, we show how historical politicization of sub-group differences has rendered some communities more susceptible to fragmented ethnic voting than others. We explore the implications of our findings for identity politics and democratic consolidation. We argue that even where we see fragmented ethnic voting, the internal divisions within a community can promote accountability.
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