Karen E. Ferree

Explaining South Africa's Racial Census

In all South African elections since 1994, race has been an overwhelming predictor of voting behavior for most of the South African electorate. This paper evaluates three explanations for this outcome: an expressive hypothesis, which sees voting as an act of identity expression; a politics-as-usual approach, which points to standard factors like policy preferences or performance evaluations; and a racial heuristics approach, which suggests that voters use race as a cognitive shortcut during elections. It finds that racial heuristics, combined with performance evaluations, provide the best explanation for South Africas racial census.

Ties that bind? The rise and decline of ethno-regional partisanship in Malawi, 1994–2009

In the first three elections following Malawis return to democracy in 1993, voting patterns displayed a clear ethno-regional pattern. Then in 2009 the regional pattern broke down in dramatic fashion, with the incumbent President, Bingu wa Mutharika, attracting majority support across all three regions. This article first examines whether ethnic identities were at the root of Malawis ethno-regional electoral pattern. Our tests show that while ethnic identities were associated with partisan attachments in some areas, regional patterns were more consistently related to other factors, particularly views of the governments performance and the inclusiveness of the ruling party. We then examine the breakdown of the regional pattern, drawing on trend analysis of public opinion data from 1999 to 2008. We show that by 2009 the majority of Malawians in all three regions had come to hold positive views of Mutharikas performance and had come to see his government as inclusive. We conclude, therefore, that shifts in patterns of partisanship had more to do with political factors – Mutharikas symbolic and substantive policies during this first term – than ethnic identities. Malawi reminds us that incumbents, when faced with incentives to construct multi-ethnic support bases, can use the power of the state to reach out across ethnic political boundaries and re-order supposedly entrenched patterns of partisanship.

Voting behavior and electoral irregularities in Kenya's 2013 Election

Data from a unique nationwide exit poll of 6258 voters are employed to explore two central themes of the 2013 Kenyan Election: (1) the correlates of individual vote choice; and (2) the credibility of the electoral process. The analysis reveals several striking relationships between an individuals vote choice, personal attributes, and perceptions of the campaign and candidates. We find that the leading coalitions mostly kept their co-ethnics together, although ethnic alliances proved somewhat less certain than in the past. We find that, for the most part, voters treated Uhuru Kenyatta – not sitting Prime Minister Raila Odinga – as the incumbent. The data show that campaign issues also influenced the vote: Odinga garnered more support on issues related to constitutional implementation, corruption, and the International Criminal Court (ICC), while Kenyatta won on the economy, employment, and security. Exit poll data also reveal irregularities in the electoral process, including some evidence of inflated vote totals benefitting the Jubilee coalition and illegal administrative activities. The data, while not definitive, are highly suggestive of a deeply flawed electoral process and challenge claims that Kenyatta won a majority in the first round.

Who's Asking? Interviewer Coethnicity Effects in African Survey Data

Face-to-face interviews constitute a social interaction between interviewer and respondent, and in the African context, social interactions are strongly shaped by ethnicity. Yet research using African survey data typically fails to account for the effect of shared ethnicity on survey responses. We find that respondents give systematically different answers to coethnic and noncoethnic interviewers across surveys in 14 African countries, but with significant variation in the degree of bias across question types and types of noncoethnic dyads, with the largest effects occurring where both the respondent and interviewer are members of ethnic groups with a history of political competition and conflict, and where the respondent or interviewer shares an ethnicity with the head of state. Our findings have practical implications for consumers of African survey data and underscore the context dependence of the social interaction that constitutes the survey experience.

Institutional Duration and Growth in Africa

We argue that there are strong reasons to believe that continuous competitive, multiparty elections produce different growth dynamics than first competitive elections. We test this conjecture by looking at the effects of competitive elections and their endurance on growth rates in African countries from 1970 to 2001. We find that initial competitive elections do not offer a growth dividend over having no elections at all, although noncompetitive elections may result in a growth penalty. However, over time, countries that hold competitive elections slowly begin outperforming those without them—especially those that hold noncompetitive elections. Africa’s poor growth experience may therefore be related less to an unwillingness to experiment with democracy, than to an inability to consolidate democratic reforms once in place.

Between Science and Engineering: Reflections on the APSA Presidential Task Force on Political Science, Electoral Rules, and Democratic Governance

Political scientists have contributed to the world of electoral systems as scientists and as engineers. Taking stock of recent scientific research, we show that context modifies the effects of electoral rules on political outcomes in specific and systematic ways. We explore how electoral rules shape the inclusion of women and minorities, the depth and nature of political competition, and patterns of redistribution and regulation, and we consider institutional innovations that could promote political equality. Finally, we describe the diverse ways that political scientists produce an impact on the world by sharing and applying their knowledge of the consequences of electoral rules and global trends in reform.

Why the salience of social divisions matters in party systems: Testing the interactive hypothesis in South Africa

Scholars have long argued social diversity, and electoral institutions interactively shape party systems: diversity has little effect on the effective number of parties (ENP) in single member plurality (SMP) systems but increases ENP in proportional ones. We argue instead that where diversity is salient enough to generate demand for parties, it also hinders strategic coordination, preventing SMP rules from reducing the number of parties and producing a correlation between diversity and ENP. In contrast, non-salient forms of diversity have little impact regardless of institutional rules. We test this intuition using data from South Africa’s municipal mixed-member system and explore its highly salient racial cleavage and less salient ethnic one. We find racial diversity correlates with ENP in SMP systems while ethnic diversity correlates with ENP in neither SMP nor proportional representation systems. Our study contributes to mounting evidence questioning the interactive hypothesis and points to the importance of the salience of social divisions in shaping party systems.