Voting Against the Grain: Partisan Geography, Electoral Competition, and Voter Behavior
Partisans often face two dilemmas when deciding to vote for a potentially better-performing opposition candidate in clientelistic distributive systems. First, whether the opposition candidate, once elected, will provide them with promised public goods. Second, whether they can sanction the politician should she renege. I argue that partisans’ fears of exclusion and inability to punish shirking is much lower in electoral districts where parties’ supporters live side-by-side (partisan nonsegregated) and elections are competitive compared to other electoral settings. Accordingly, partisans are more likely to cross party lines in nonsegregated and competitive constituencies than in other settings. Using a conjoint experiment administered to voters sampled from a stratified sample of constituencies in Ghana, I show that voters in competitive, nonsegregated districts are the most willing to cross party lines. Additional data on voters’ perceptions of actual public goods distribution and political efficacy support the mechanism. My results demonstrate how partisan geography and electoral competitiveness jointly shape democratic accountability in clientelistic systems.
Working paper.
Citation
@unpublished{k._ofosu2024,
author = {K. Ofosu, George},
title = {Voting {Against} the {Grain:} {Partisan} {Geography,}
{Electoral} {Competition,} and {Voter} {Behavior}},
date = {2024-06-01},
url = {https://georgeofosu.com/publications/working-papers/voting-against-the-grain.html},
langid = {en},
abstract = {Partisans often face two dilemmas when deciding to vote
for a potentially better-performing opposition candidate in
clientelistic distributive systems. First, whether the opposition
candidate, once elected, will provide them with promised public
goods. Second, whether they can sanction the politician should she
renege. I argue that partisans’ fears of exclusion and inability to
punish shirking is much lower in electoral districts where parties’
supporters live side-by-side (partisan nonsegregated) *and*
elections are competitive compared to other electoral settings.
Accordingly, partisans are more likely to cross party lines in
nonsegregated and competitive constituencies than in other settings.
Using a conjoint experiment administered to voters sampled from a
stratified sample of constituencies in Ghana, I show that voters in
competitive, nonsegregated districts are the most willing to cross
party lines. Additional data on voters’ perceptions of actual public
goods distribution and political efficacy support the mechanism. My
results demonstrate how partisan geography and electoral
competitiveness jointly shape democratic accountability in
clientelistic systems.}
}