Tribal Influence on Voting: Evidence from the Tunisian Voter Roll

• In Event: Politics of Development in MENA

Abstract

Do the tribal affiliations of voters and candidates pattern political behavior? How do tribal affiliations interact with parties and gender? We evaluate these questions by matching historical dictionaries of Tunisian tribes to the surnames from universe of both registered voters and candidates from Tunisia's recent local elections (2018). We present four main findings. First, we find that Tunisians with tribal affiliation are underrepresented among candidates for electoral office: the share of tribal candidates running on lists for municipal councils is lower than the share of tribal voters in 98 percent of municipalities. Second, we find a strong polling station-level correlation between the concentration of tribal voters and the performance of lists that prioritize tribal candidates, and are currently engaged in ongoing survey work to evaluate whether this correlation is produced by expectations of shared preferences, favoritism, responsiveness, and/or perceived trustworthiness. Third, we examine which lists are more likely to prioritize tribal candidates. We find that tribal candidates are less likely to be prioritized by the Tunisian Islamist movement Ennahda. Following previous work, we also investigate the interaction between gender and tribal identity. We uncover small and imprecise estimates of gendered selection of tribal candidates and find no evidence that gender moderates the electoral success of tribal candidates. Taken together, our work has considerable potential to show how these embedded social formations exert a subtle but important influence on voting behavior in a critical Middle Eastern case.

Authors

• Oliver Markus Lang, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Steven Brooke, University of Wisconsin- Madison

• Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, New York University Abu Dhabi

• Alexandra Domike Blackman, Cornell University