IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/gigawp/96.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Power of Proximity: Strategic Decisions in African Party Politics

Author

Listed:
  • Stroh, Alexander

Abstract

Recent publications suggest that exclusively ethnoregional parties are as rare in sub-Saharan Africa as elsewhere. At the same time, the idea that ethnicity is a very special feature of African party politics persists. The paper acknowledges the general relevance of ethnicity in party competition but emphasizes the level on which it becomes important. It develops a microbehavioral approach which pays particular attention to the strategic choices of party elites in order to supplement the dominant structuralist thinking in party research on Africa. An in-depth evaluation of detailed election data from Burkina Faso shows that strategies which rely on personal proximity between the voter and the candidates influence the parties' success to a great extent. Parties maximize their chances of winning seats if they concentrate their limited resources on the home localities of leading party members. Hence, African party politics are less dependent on ethnic demography than is often implied but more open to change through elite behavior.

Suggested Citation

  • Stroh, Alexander, 2009. "The Power of Proximity: Strategic Decisions in African Party Politics," GIGA Working Papers 96, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:gigawp:96
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/47766/1/609105086.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Anthony Downs, 1957. "An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 65(2), pages 135-135.
    2. Elischer, Sebastian, 2008. "Ethnic Coalitions of Convenience and Commitment: Political Parties and Party Systems in Kenya," GIGA Working Papers 68, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    3. Lemarchand, René, 1972. "Political Clientelism and Ethnicity in Tropical Africa:* Competing Solidarities in Nation-Building," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 66(1), pages 68-90, March.
    4. Becher, Anika & Basedau, Matthias, 2008. "Promoting Peace and Democracy through Party Regulation? Ethnic Party Bans in Africa," GIGA Working Papers 66, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Stroh, Alexander, 2009. "The Effects of Electoral Institutions in Rwanda: Why Proportional Representation Supports the Authoritarian Regime," GIGA Working Papers 105, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    2. Moroff, Anika, 2010. "Ethnic Party Bans in East Africa from a Comparative Perspective," GIGA Working Papers 129, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    3. Reeg, Caroline, 2017. "Spatial development initiatives – potentials, challenges and policy lessons: with a specific outlook for inclusive agrocorridors in Sub-Sahara Africa," IDOS Studies, German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), volume 97, number 97, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Erdmann, Gero, 2007. "Ethnicity, Voter Alignment and Political Party Affiliation – an African Case: Zambia," GIGA Working Papers 45, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    2. Erdmann, Gero, 2007. "The Cleavage Model, Ethnicity and Voter Alignment in Africa: Conceptual and Methodological Problems Revisited," GIGA Working Papers 63, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    3. Timothy Frye & John Reuter & David Szakonyi, 2012. "Political Machines at Work: Voter Mobilization and Electoral Subversion in the Workplace," HSE Working papers WP BRP 08/PS/2012, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
    4. Christophe Crombez, 2004. "Introduction," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 16(3), pages 227-231, July.
    5. Persson, Torsten & Tabellini, Guido, 2002. "Political economics and public finance," Handbook of Public Economics, in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 24, pages 1549-1659, Elsevier.
    6. Kaivan Munshi & Mark Rosenzweig, 2008. "The Efficacy of Parochial Politics: Caste, Commitment, and Competence in Indian Local Governments," NBER Working Papers 14335, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Navin Kartik & Francesco Squintani & Katrin Tinn, 2024. "Information Revelation and Pandering in Elections," Papers 2406.17084, arXiv.org.
    8. Burkhard Schipper & Hee Yeul Woo, 2012. "Political Awareness and Microtargeting of Voters in Electoral Competition," Working Papers 124, University of California, Davis, Department of Economics.
    9. Marco Faravelli & Randall Walsh, 2011. "Smooth Politicians And Paternalistic Voters: A Theory Of Large Elections," Levine's Working Paper Archive 786969000000000250, David K. Levine.
    10. Hank C. Jenkins-Smith & Neil J. Mitchell & Kerry G. Herron, 2004. "Foreign and Domestic Policy Belief Structures in the U.S. and British Publics," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 48(3), pages 287-309, June.
    11. Eric Kaufmann & Henry Patterson, 2006. "Intra‐Party Support for the Good Friday Agreement in the Ulster Unionist Party," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 54(3), pages 509-532, October.
    12. Micael Castanheira, 2003. "Why Vote For Losers?," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 1(5), pages 1207-1238, September.
    13. Peter J. Coughlin, 2015. "Probabilistic voting in models of electoral competition," Chapters, in: Jac C. Heckelman & Nicholas R. Miller (ed.), Handbook of Social Choice and Voting, chapter 13, pages 218-234, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    14. Mihir Bhattacharya, 2019. "Constitutionally consistent voting rules over single-peaked domains," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 52(2), pages 225-246, February.
    15. Marc Henry & Ismael Mourifié, 2013. "Euclidean Revealed Preferences: Testing The Spatial Voting Model," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(4), pages 650-666, June.
    16. , & ,, 2006. "Group formation and voter participation," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 1(4), pages 461-487, December.
    17. Dendi Ramdani & Arjen Witteloostuijn, 2012. "The Shareholder–Manager Relationship and Its Impact on the Likelihood of Firm Bribery," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 108(4), pages 495-507, July.
    18. Alan E. Wiseman, 2006. "A Theory of Partisan Support and Entry Deterrence in Electoral Competition," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 18(2), pages 123-158, April.
    19. Alessandro Olper & Johan Swinnen, 2013. "Mass Media and Public Policy: Global Evidence from Agricultural Policies," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 27(3), pages 413-436.
    20. Armèn Hakhverdian, 2009. "Capturing Government Policy on the Left–Right Scale: Evidence from the United Kingdom, 1956–2006," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 57(4), pages 720-745, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:gigawp:96. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dueiide.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.