UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Severed Connections: Political Parties and Democratic Responsiveness in Sub-Saharan Africa Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3388n6qr Author Choi, Dong-Hyun Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Severed Connections: Political Parties and Democratic Responsiveness in Sub-Saharan Africa by Dong-Hyun Choi A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Sicence in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Leonardo R. Arriola, Chair Professor Ruth Berins Collier Professor Thad Dunning Professor Noam Yuchtman Summer 2018 Severed Connections: Political Parties and Democratic Responsiveness in Sub-Saharan Africa Copyright 2018 by Dong-Hyun Choi 1 Abstract Severed Connections: Political Parties and Democratic Responsiveness in Sub-Saharan Africa by Dong-Hyun Choi Doctor of Philosophy in Political Sicence University of California, Berkeley Professor Leonardo R. Arriola, Chair This dissertation investigates how political parties can undermine the representation of citizen interests in new democracies. Conventional wisdom has emphasized the centrality of parties in mediating the relationship between voters and politicians, and has often attributed the representational deficit observed across the developing world to the lack of stable partisan attachments or the ephemeral nature of political parties. I show that this may not be the case. To the contrary, under a political geography that enables political parties to repeatedly monopolize electoral support from voters in subnational elections, parties and the internal processes that govern their selection of candidates can function sever, rather than strengthen, the connection between voters and their representatives. My theory focuses on how conditions typical of many new democracies in Sub-Saharan Africa—local one party dominance and centralized control over candidate selection—shape the incentives of politicians to serve the interests of their constituents. Despite the institu- tionalization of competitive multiparty elections at the national level in new democracies, political parties are often able to consistently dominate their competitors in subnational elec- tions. Under conditions of local one party dominance, politicians who contest local office become beholden to the selectorate which decides who the party’s nominee will be, without much regard to the electorate. Yet for the party leader, who controls the selection of candi- dates within their parties, local politicians who amass an independent support base by serving the interests of their constituents pose a significant threat towards maintaining her position in the party hierarchy. I argue that the party leader selects candidates in a way that minimizes the risk of politicians building such an independent support base, encouraging responsiveness to constituents only in select locales where they are electorally vulnerable. As a result, politi- cians are incentivized to divert their effort and resources away from serving their constituents towards other activities that benefit the party leader. I support these claims using a multi-method research strategy that pieces together qual- itative, quantitative, and experimental evidence based on 18 months of fieldwork in Kenya. I first combine insights from more than 70 politician interviews and analyses of nationally representative surveys and constituency-level electoral returns across six African democra- 2 cies to establish that African parties often hold a monopoly on local power. Moreover, using detailed inquiry into the organization of political parties in Kenya and a series of experi- ments conducted among Kenyan primary voters, I also show that party leaders possess both the institutional tools and the persuasive influence over partisans that enable them to com- mand control over the candidate selection process. Finally, I use supervised machine-learning methods on a large data set collected through web-crawling to document the existence of a nomination tournament, in which party leaders select candidates that invest significantly in “party-oriented” rather than “constituency-oriented” behavior over their terms in office. Substantively, the findings contribute to the emerging consensus that democratic elec- tions are necessary but insufficient to foster better representation and responsiveness for the people. However, while the dominant narrative in the comparative politics has focused on structural-institutional factors such as ethnicity, clientelism, or electoral systems to under- stand this deficit, I shift the attention rightfully back to political parties. In fact, the conclu- sions of the dissertation suggest that ideal of “representative democracy” is likely to remain elusive unless democracy within political parties is realized. When power and authority over party institutions and decision-making processes accumulate to a single individual or a small group of elites, and without systematic checks to constrain their power, party leaders have the potential to effectively become autocrats within their domain; manipulating elected rep- resentatives who should primarily be interested in tending to their constituents to serve their political ambitions, thereby derailing democratic process that they should protect. i To my parents, Charan Min and Yangsik Choi ii Contents Contents ii List of Figures iv List of Tables vi 1 Introduction1 1.1 Existing Explanations for Unresponsiveness................. 5 1.2 Argument of the Dissertation......................... 10 1.3 Implications of the Argument......................... 12 1.4 Empirical Strategy and Organization..................... 14 2 A Theory of Politician Responsiveness 17 2.1 Political Parties and Democratic Representation............... 20 2.2 Candidate Selection and Politician Behavior: A Simple Framework . 21 2.3 The Problem of the Double Mandate..................... 23 2.4 Local One Party Dominance and the Importance of Selection . 25 2.5 Centralized Control over Candidate Selection ................ 27 2.6 Paths to Unresponsiveness .......................... 33 2.7 Summary ................................... 37 3 Testing Responsiveness 38 3.1 Introduction.................................. 38 3.2 Research Design................................ 41 3.3 Data...................................... 42 3.4 Estimating Constituency Level Issue Priorities................ 47 3.5 Investigating Congruence........................... 50 3.6 The Moderating Influence of Political Competition ............. 52 3.7 Summary ................................... 55 4 Political Parties as Gatekeepers 56 4.1 Myth or Reality? Partisan Attachments in Africa............... 58 4.2 Dominant Parties in Subnational Elections.................. 66 4.3 Party Dominance and the Fate of African Politicians............. 74 iii 4.4 Summary ................................... 88 5 Institutional Strategies of Control 89 5.1 Why Party Leaders Want to Control Party Nominations........... 90 5.2 Party Leader Strategies to Control Party Nominations............ 92 5.3 Case Study: The Orange Democratic Movement (ODM)........... 97 6 Controlling Nominations Through Primary Voters 112 6.1 Persuasion as an Instrument of Control.................... 113 6.2 Testing party influence in primary elections . 119 6.3 Experiments on the Influence of Party Endorsements . 122 6.4 Summary ................................... 140 7 The Nomination Tournament 141 7.1 The Logic of the Nomination Tournament .................. 143 7.2 Qualitative Evidence ............................. 145 7.3 Quantitative Evidence............................. 153 7.4 Summary ................................... 166 8 Conclusion 167 8.1 Summry of the Argument........................... 167 8.2 Summary of Empirical Findings ....................... 169 8.3 Understanding Democratic Responsiveness Elsewhere . 170 8.4 Revisiting the Party-Representation Nexus.................. 171 8.5 Responsiveness, Internal Party Democracy, and Democratic Consolidation . 173 A Appendix 176 A.1 Auxiliary Figures for Chapter 6: Primary Elections Analysis . 176 A.2 Auxiliary Figures for Chapter 6: Candidate Evaluation Experiment . 177 A.3 Auxiliary Figures for Chapter 6. Conjoint Analysis . 179 A.4 News Script for Chapter 6. Candidate Evaluation Experiment . 181 Bibliography 183 iv List of Figures 1.1 Perceptions of Representative Responsiveness, Afrobarometer Rounds 2–6... 2 2.1 A Theory of Politician Responsiveness...................... 18 2.2 Citizen Perceptions of Representative Responsibilities, Afrobarometer Round 4 24 2.3 The Nomination Tournament and Politician Behavior.............. 35 2.4 Margin of Victory for Legislative Elections in Africa .............. 36 3.1 Image of Townhall Meeting Presided Over by a Sitting Member of Parliament . 39 3.2 Location of Afrobarometer Respondents in Kenya, Rounds 2–3......... 43 3.3 Proportion of CDF Spent Across Categories, Kenya 2005–2008......... 45 3.4 CDF Category Expenditures over Time, Kenya 2005–2008........... 46 3.5 Proportion of residents identifying each issue area as a local priority . 49 3.6 Bivariate Relationship between Issues and CDF Expenditures.......... 51 3.7 Incumbent Margin of Victory in Parliamentary Elections, Kenya 2002 . 53 4.1 Partisan Attachments Amongst African Voters, 2002–2014..........