Career Background and Electoral Campaign Strategy in African Democracies

• In Event: Candidate Selection and Political Behavior in Africa

Abstract

How does career background impact campaign strategy and competitiveness in African elections? The literature on democratization in Africa has long-held that clientelistic spending ties fuel success on the campaign trail, giving considerable advantages to incumbents and otherwise wealthy candidates. Our paper documents a new trend in Kenya, one of Africa’s emerging democracies: the number of legislators with NGO work experience surpassed 25 percent in the last two legislatures, breaking into candidacy pipelines otherwise dominated by individuals with more traditional career backgrounds in law, business, and government. This raises an important question about how these new types of candidates are able to leverage (alternative) resources and connections in order to appeal to political parties and voters and to compete with candidates with more traditional employment histories.

To address this question, we conducted an original survey of 549 national- and county-level legislative aspirants contesting the 2017 Kenyan general election. Our analysis shows that NGO career backgrounds play a substitution role for candidates in two important ways. First, NGO work can serve as a substitute for campaign finance resources and credibility. Because Kenyan politics is clientelistic, aspirants must often distribute cash, jobs, food, and other goods in order to compete, either personally financed or through access to the state. However, NGO workers who are relatively resource poor can attempt to claim personal credit for the private and club goods provided by their NGOs without necessarily having to make significant financial outlays of their own. Some, in fact, start NGOs for this very reason. Aspirants with NGO backgrounds can also potentially make more credible programmatic appeals than aspirants from more traditional backgrounds, particularly if the appeals align with their NGO’s development and policy objectives. Together, these open up an alternative pathway to win voters’ support absent significant personal wealth. Second, NGO work can serve as a substitute for political or party experience. Though NGO workers typically do not have longstanding party affiliations or track records in politics, they can develop other skills and connections that enhance their appeal to parties and voters. In attempting to win over party selectorates, NGO workers can draw on the fact that they commonly liaise with local power brokers and politicians through their work. In attempting to win over the electorate, an NGO background can increase aspirants’ valence in their constituencies via the name recognition associated with their organizations.

While an NGO background can thus act as a substitute for traditional resources and experience, it appears to be an imperfect one—while aspirants with NGO backgrounds have more electoral success than other non-traditional aspirants, they do not appear to be as competitive as more traditional aspirants, and so are particularly likely to fill reserved, nominated, and other less competitive seats. Nonetheless, NGO work remains a viable alternative path to political office, especially for individuals for whom more traditional paths to office are less available, such as female and resource poor aspirants.

Authors

• Karisa Tritz Cloward, Southern Methodist University

• Keith Weghorst, Vanderbilt University