Sectoral interests and regional bloc voting in African countries

This paper contributes to a new line of research on interest-based and policy determinants of electoral cleavages that are visible at the national level in African presidential contests since the 1990s. Using constituency-level electoral data, we identify persistent patterns of regional clustering in the presidential vote in the last several election rounds in Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia, underscoring both the persistence of these regional clusters over time and, using DHS survey data, that most of the regional electoral blocs are multiethnic. By combining these results with new data from economic geography, we also show that most of the persistent regional voting blocs display a distinct spatial overlap with specialized producer regions, mostly agricultural regions. These novel observations about the persistence of regional electoral blocs, the multiethnicity of regional electoral clusters, and the distinctive economic profiles of the electoral clusters combine to shed new light on long-standing questions in the political economy of African elections. Our analysis suggests that coethnicity alone does not account for the cohesion of most of the persistent electoral blocs and that bloc cohesion can arise from the combination of ethnic and sectoral policy interests.