Instruments of Control: Leader Endorsements and Candidate Selection in Africa

• In Event: Democracy in Africa: New Opportunities, New Challenges

Abstract

Political parties in the developing world increasingly rely on primary elections to nominate their candidates for elected office. For party leaders, the introduction of primaries means losing an important tool with which they can reward and sanction the behavior of elected party elites. How can party leaders attempt to retain control over the candidate selection process, even when they no longer possess the institutionalized authority to impose their choice of candidates for nomination? I argue that party leaders can do so by using a strategy - political endorsements - to directly appeal to their co-partisans to select their preferred aspirant during the party primaries. Due to the psychological attachment between party leaders and their co-partisans, the party leader’s endorsement acts as a powerful heuristic upon which primary voters base their evaluation of the aspirant pool. I test this argument using a series of experiments embedded in a large scale survey of likely primary voters of two major political parties in Kenya. I find that the endorsements and denouncements of a party leader have strong effects on her co-partisan’s evaluation of primary aspirants: the party leader’s co-partisans are significantly more (less) likely to vote for an aspirant endorsed (denounced) by their party leader. The magnitude of this effect is large enough to offset the effect of well-established predictors such as candidate quality or performance, and is consistently observed across the partisans of both parties.

Author

• Donghyun Danny Choi, University of California, Berkeley