An Electoral Geography of Africa: Sectoral Profile of Persistent Electoral Blocs

• In Event: Territory, Politics, and Power in Africa

Abstract

The geographic concentration of electoral support is a nearly universal phenomenon for all political regimes having elections, albeit at different levels, but scholars in African politics have given less attention to the spatial aspects of electoral competition. Identifying spatial and scalar patterns in electoral competition in Ghana, Malawi, Kenya, and Zambia over multiple, consecutive election years, Boone et al. (2020) show that in each country, there are regional blocs that have persistently voted together over time. The persistent electoral blocs are multiethnic, and are not necessarily social-identity-based communities. What then explains the persistence of regional cohesion in their political affiliation? What are the territorial and socio-economic sources of bloc voting in Africa? In this paper, we evaluate the so-called persistent electoral blocs, searching to determine to what extent agricultural crop production accounts for the regional concentration of similar votes. Production of the same major agricultural staples may produce joint economic interests, and these may predict joint bloc voting. Using geocoded household survey data from various sources including IPUMS and living standard survey for the four aforementioned countries, we find that the territories of major local crop production and the persistent electoral blocs largely coincide, and that the statistically significant crops in the blocs are distinctive from each other. These economic differences across the persistent electoral blocs suggest that economically disparate interests are critical in producing forms of regionalism that find political expression in basic and stable units of political competition, raising questions about the impact of industrial development (or decline of agricultural regions) on the durability of the blocs and the ways in which the blocs build political coalitions with the others.

Authors

• Eun Kyung Kim, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

• Catherine Boone, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

• Juliette Crespin-Boucaud, IBEI