Mobile Phones and the Nationalisation of Politics

• In Event: Poster Session: New Research in Information Technology and Politics & Canadian Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: New Research in Information Technology & Politics

Abstract

In many low-income countries, politics takes place in uncertain political environments. This makes one’s personal economic circumstances a stronger heuristic for government performance, such that economic voting is predominantly egotropic in nature. Yet as information about the macroeconomy and the inequality it embeds profilerates, we might expect voters to respond in a more sociotropic way, either directly rewarding incumbents for overseeing strong growth, or benchmarking their personal circumstances against national trends. To examine this mechanism, this paper studies the recent, rapid and homogenous expansion of mobile phone use across Sub-Saharan Africa. Mobile phones have a well-established informational function, and evidence from survey data and nighttime lights suggest that users make more accurate assessments of the national economy and use them when deciding how to vote. The argument is strengthened with analysis of polling-booth results in Senegal and Malawi, exploiting the rollout of mobile coverage over time through a spatial difference-in-differences design. Overall, the paper shows that information proliferation can have important, nuanced effects for the nature of performance voting in new democracies.

Author

• Alex Yeandle, London School of Economics