Who is Targeted, and By Whom? The Role of Distortions and Ethno-partisanship in Normative Evaluations of Clientelism

Where political parties form around coalitions of ethnic groups, as in many sub-Saharan African democracies, political actors’ favoritism toward their own supporters plays a prominent and normatively fraught role in electoral competition and public service delivery. However, little is known about how citizens normatively evaluate whether such “clientelistic behaviors” should be considered illegal and punishable. This study hypothesizes that citizens will desire greater punishment for clientelistic actions when (a) the behavior is more distortionary (e.g., targeting coethnics vs. copartisans vs. general people), and (b) the citizen holds opposing ethnopartisanship to the ac-tor. We also posit a positive interaction between the two. Using a survey experiment conducted in Kenya (n=1,946) with Kikuyu and Luo respondents ahead of the 2017 national elections, we ask participants to assign punishment for various clientelistic be-haviors. The results show that citizens systematically award more punishment when actors target their supporters rather than general people, with little difference between coethnic versus copartisan targeting. Citizens also punish actors more from the oppos-ing ethnopartisanship, but there is no systematic interaction effect between the level of distortion and (un)shared ethnopartisanship.