When performance evaluations conflict with partisan leanings, which way do voters turn?
In many electoral contexts, voters are increasingly cross-pressured between long-standing identity attachments and evaluations of economic performance. While cross-pressured voters have been shown to behave differently in advanced democracies, far less is known about how they navigate electoral choice in African contexts.
We employ a multinomial logistic regression and data from Round 9 of the Afrobarometer survey to analyse the voting patterns of this segment. Consistent with previous studies, our results show that voting patterns in Africa reflect both identity orientations and economic-based calculus.
The central finding of this study is that prospective or expected national economic evaluations, rather than retrospective and personal economic evaluations, structure the behavioural resolution of cross-pressured voters in African dominant-party contexts.
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Specifically, the study finds that ruling-party partisans who are cross-pressured in terms of their prospective evaluations of national economic conditions are more likely to disengage than to realign or switch, a pattern that, in principle, structurally advantages ruling parties.
In contrast, ruling partisans cross pressured on personal or household economic conditions neither switch nor exit the electorate; instead, they maintain loyalty to the ruling party, which we attribute to Aldrich’s (1995) pork-barrel politics encompassing distributive benefits within narrower geographic constituencies.
For robustness, besides presenting findings from Africa’s five geographical regions, we also model opposition-party partisans who are cross-pressured by optimistic economic evaluations. The symmetric robustness checks indicate that forward-looking national economic optimism among cross-pressured opposition partisans is associated with realignment toward the incumbent.
This study contributes to debates in comparative politics on the psychological underpinnings of electoral choice, shedding light on electoral alignment, realignment, and dealignment in African dominant party systems.
Lloyd George Banda is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cape Town and a visiting lecturer at Rhodes University.