Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Voting Behavior in African Democracies

政治学博士论文研究：非洲民主国家的投票行为

• 批准号: 0921844
• 负责人: Josephine Andrews
• 金额: $ 1.2万
• 依托单位: University of California-Davis
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-09-15 至 2010-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0921844&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Political; Science

The extent and intent to which Africans use their right to vote is of paramount importance to the success of democratization. If, as many experts argue, political participation in Africa is a continuation of cultural and historical patronage linkages between politicians and citizens, democracy, especially voting, is mere window dressing. If politicians pay voters to turn out and vote for them, or if they persuade co-ethnics to vote for them with promises of enrichment and prosperity once elected, citizens may be free, but their country is not a competitive democracy. This dissertation examines voting behavior, including why citizens turnout and who they vote for, in nine Sub-Saharan African democracies. While conventional wisdom suggests that ethnicity and clientelism explain voting in Africa, individual-level evidence suggests that these explanations may not predict turnout and choice in African democracies. Voting behavior in Africa is addressed using two methodologies, structured experiments and analysis of cross-national survey data. The most innovative aspect of this project is the use of experimental research techniques to understand voting behavior in Africa. This experiment uses a game commonly employed in economic experiments, the Ultimatum Game, to examine how individuals choose between alternatives that represent competing theories of vote choice in Africa, including ethnicity, vote buying, corruption, and accountability. It extends the work of Inman and Andrews (2008), which finds that citizens are more likely to participate when they perceive their government as corrupt. Thus, accountability plays a much greater role than traditional theory would suggest. With results from experiments carried out in Senegal and Ghana, it will be possible to investigate both turnout and vote choice at the individual level, in particular, how an individual's voting behavior is influenced by their evaluation of governmental performance, as opposed to traditional factors such as ethnic ties. Survey results from nine African democracies and country-level factors, such as length of democracy, will be used to examine voting behavior, as well as to validate the experimental results. In combination, these methodologies will provide a rich picture of voting behavior in Africa's emerging democracies.This work has broader implications for the study of modernization and democratization. Democratization has been slow to take hold in most African countries. Przeworski and Limongi (1997) find that democracy is almost never sustained in poor, underdeveloped countries. Given that most African countries can be characterized as poor and underdeveloped (e.g. see Easterly and Levine 1997), the weight of empirical evidence suggests that democracy will not be sustained in Africa. Yet, some African countries have made democratic transitions successfully, despite the predictions of the modernization theory of democracy. While these transitions have been studied at the institutional and elite level (e.g. Bratton and van de Walle 1997, Villalon and VonDoepp 2005), little attention has been paid to the role that citizens play in maintaining stable democracies. This project will evaluate the extent to which citizens make voting decisions based on evaluations of governmental performance, which may be directly related to the willingness of citizens to continue accepting the authority of democratic governments. One of the basic predictions of modernization theory is that education provides citizens the cognitive capacity to hold their leaders accountable. To the extent that Africans hold their leaders accountable, even without the resources and skills that modernization theory would predict, we have a basis of comparison between voters in non-industrialized and industrialized countries. Thus, the project has the potential to enhance understanding of voting behavior in industrialized vs. non-industrialized countries.

非洲人行使其投票权的程度和意图对民主化的成功至关重要。如果像许多专家所说的那样，非洲的政治参与是政治家和公民之间文化和历史赞助关系的延续，那么民主，尤其是选举，仅仅是装点门面而已。如果政治家付钱让选民投票给他们，或者他们承诺一旦当选就会富裕和繁荣，从而说服同种族的选民投票给他们，那么公民可能是自由的，但他们的国家不是一个竞争性的民主国家。本文研究了撒哈拉以南非洲九个民主国家的投票行为，包括公民投票的原因和他们投票给谁。虽然传统观点认为种族和庇护主义解释了非洲的投票，但个人层面的证据表明，这些解释可能无法预测非洲民主国家的投票率和选择。非洲的投票行为采用两种方法，结构化实验和跨国调查数据分析。这个项目最具创新性的方面是使用实验研究技术来了解非洲的投票行为。本实验使用了一种通常用于经济实验的游戏，即最后通牒游戏，来研究个人如何在代表非洲投票选择竞争理论的替代方案中进行选择，包括种族、贿选、腐败和问责制。它扩展了Inman和Andrews（2008）的工作，他们发现当公民认为他们的政府腐败时，他们更有可能参与。因此，问责制的作用比传统理论所认为的要大得多。根据在塞内加尔和加纳进行的实验的结果，将有可能在个人层面调查投票率和投票选择，特别是调查个人的投票行为如何受到他们对政府绩效的评价的影响，而不是种族关系等传统因素。来自九个非洲民主国家的调查结果和国家层面的因素，如民主的长度，将被用来检查投票行为，以及验证实验结果。综合起来，这些方法将提供非洲新兴民主国家投票行为的丰富图景。这项工作对现代化和民主化的研究具有更广泛的意义。大多数非洲国家的民主化进程缓慢。Przeworski和Limongi（1997）发现，在贫穷、不发达的国家，民主几乎从未持续过。鉴于大多数非洲国家可以被描述为贫穷和不发达（例如，见Easterly和Levine 1997），经验证据的权重表明，民主将不会在非洲持续下去。然而，一些非洲国家成功地实现了民主转型，尽管民主的现代化理论的预测。虽然这些转变已经在机构和精英层面进行了研究（例如Bratton和van de Walle 1997， Villalon和VonDoepp 2005），但很少有人关注公民在维持稳定民主中所起的作用。该项目将评估公民根据对政府绩效的评估做出投票决定的程度，这可能与公民继续接受民主政府权威的意愿直接相关。现代化理论的一个基本预测是，教育为公民提供了让他们的领导人负责的认知能力。即使没有现代化理论所预测的资源和技能，非洲人也对他们的领导人负责，我们在非工业化国家和工业化国家的选民之间有一个比较的基础。因此，该项目有可能增强对工业化国家与非工业化国家投票行为的理解。