Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Voter Expectations of Candidates in Parliamentary Elections in the Middle East

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Abundant research in political science seeks to understand the relationship between citizens and their government by explaining why voters behave the way they do in established democracies. Only recently have scholars started to study voter behavior under electoral authoritarianism. The limited extant work on voter calculations at the ballot box in authoritarian settings engenders little consensus, and offers a dizzying array of conclusions that are rarely generalizable beyond a single case. For example, the scholarly literature on electoral politics in the Middle East makes a number of blanket statements about the motivations behind voter behavior, highlighting the importance of Islamism, tribalism, and patronage yet failing to distinguish systematically the degree to which each of these motivations is actually relevant in different contexts. The project directly tests hypotheses and observes causal processes relating to the determinants of voter behavior in the authoritarian Middle East. Why do citizens in authoritarian settings vote in elections? Do tribal or religious appeals confer varying advantages on different candidates? What types of patronage or policies do voters expect from different candidates?To address these questions, the project conducts an in-field voting simulation experiment paired with a follow-up survey, cross-national analyses of historical election outcomes, and an ethnographic inquiry into voter and candidate behavior. All methods will be used to test the effects of religious ideology, ethnic identification, and patronage on voting behavior in two different contexts, Jordan and Kuwait.The intellectual merit of the project lies in its ability to advance knowledge of voter decisions and candidate strategy in elections that are at first blush quite puzzling. In non-democracies, elections do not determine who governs. Understanding why citizens vote and how candidates interact with voters in such a setting is important, all the more so in the Middle East.The study has broader implications as well. Understanding the motivations behind voter behavior in the Middle East sheds light on governance in the region. If voters support co-ethnic tribal leaders out of pride or honor, rather than considering their performance in office, then elections are nothing more than "ethnic censuses" in which candidates are not held accountable for their actions in office and quality of governance is irrelevant. Voting for targeted patronage leads candidates to divert government resources from public goods provision, which benefits the country as a whole, toward favored segments of the citizenry. The selective distribution of government resources to supporters and away from the opposition in turn undermines meaningful competition for power. Most broadly, this project may contribute to understanding the conditions for regime survival and change in the Arab world, a subject of obvious importance to US national security.