Rejecting Ethnic Pandering in Urban Africa: A Survey Experiment on Voter Preferences in Nairobi, Kenya

• Author: Hye-Sung Kim,Jeremy Horowitz
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211040516
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2022, Vol. 75(4) 1240–1254

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129211040516

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Rejecting Ethnic Pandering in Urban

Africa: A Survey Experiment on Voter

Preferences in Nairobi, Kenya

Hye-Sung Kim

1

and Jeremy Horowitz

2

Abstract

Ethnic pandering, in which candidates promise to cater to the interests of coethnic voters, is presumed to be an effective

strategy for increasing electoral support in Africa’s emerging multiethnic democracies. However, ethnic political

mobilization may be disdained by citizens for its divisive and polarizing effects, particularly in urban areas. As a result,

pandering may fall on deaf ears among Africa’s urban voters. This study examines how voters in Kenya’s capital city,

Nairobi, respond to ethnic pandering using data from a vignette experiment conducted in 2015 and a replication study

implemented in 2016. Results show that respondents are more supportive of candidates who make ethnically inclusive

rather than targeted appeals, regardless of whether the candidate is identif‌ied as a coethnic. We pro pose that the results

are driven by a broad distaste among urban voters for parochial politics, rather than by strategic calculations related to

candidate viability.

Keywords

ethnicity, ethnic pandering, campaign appeals, urban voters, Africa, Kenya

Introduction

Ethnic mobilization is a routine feature of electoral

competition in Africa’s emerging multiparty democracies.

A standard assumption in the ethnic politics literature is

that candidates bolster their support among coethnic

voters by appealing to shared ethnic interests (Horowitz

1985;Posner 2005). Ethnic pandering—that is, promising

to cater to the interests of one’s group, above all with

respect to the allocation of patronage resources including

jobs, scholarships, funds for roads, and other discre-

tionary goods provided by the government—serves as

useful strategy for augmenting coethnic support (Nathan

2019;Wantchekon 2003). Yet, ethnic pandering entails

risk, particularly in Africa’s diverse urban areas.

Promises to favor one group will alienate voters from

other communities. Targeted promises may also run

afoul with coethnic voters, the intended target for such

appeals. Africa’s cities have become considerably more

integrated in recent decades: inter-marriage is common

(Bandyopadhyay and Green 2021;Crespin-Boucaud

2020), a growing share of mixed-ethnicity citizens

trace their lineage to multiple communities (Dulani et al.

2021), and social networks frequently extend across

ethnic divisions. Moreover, parochial attachments are

weaker in urban areas (Kramon et al. 2021;Robinson

2014). In line with contact theory (Allport 1954), we

propose that social integration in urban areas may temper

ethnic preferences, leading voters—particularly longer-

term residents and those whose social networks are more

diverse—to disfavor narrow appeals to ethnic interests

that promise to favor one group at the expense of others.

This proposition cuts against the grain of contemporary

research. Recent scholarship shows that parties continue

to rely on appeals to ethnic interests in urban Africa (Klaus

and Paller 2017;Nathan 2019) and that ethnicity remains

highly salient to urban voters. In Kenya, the focus of this

study, ethnic bloc voting rates in Nairobi, the capital city,

are on par with rural settings. However, we caution against

drawing inferences about ethnic political preferences

solely from observed voting behavior. As noted in prior

1

Department of Political Science, Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC,

USA

2

Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

Corresponding Author:

Hye-Sung Kim, Department of Political Science, Winthrop University,

Rock Hill, SC 29733, USA.

Email: kimh@winthrop.edu