Ruling Party Advantages from the Top-down or the Bottom-up: Evidence from Malawi

• In Event: Political Financing, Election Campaign Spending & Democratic Stability in Africa

Abstract

This paper studies resource asymmetries between government and opposition parties in parliamentary campaigns for the 2019 Malawi election. Using unique survey data from 375 parliamentary candidates in combination with qualitative interviews, we argue that the government party enjoyed resource advantages stemming both from their access to central state resources (top-down advantage), but also from more effectively incorporating well-resourced elites into their national coalition (bottom-up advantage). Empirically, we show that government party candidates received significantly more resources from their party, but also invested significantly more of their own personal resources in the campaign. Overall, our findings show that costs of parliamentary campaigns in Malawi are high and that candidates are hugely dependent on self-funding. We theorize about the further implications of our findings for research on party nationalization, party organization, and political competition.

Authors

• Michael Wahman, Michigan State University

• Merete Bech Seeberg, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University