Search

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2017., Cataloged from PDF version of thesis., Includes bibliographical references (pages 179-190)., Electoral participation is at the heart of democratic politics. Who comes to the polls, who does not, and why? In three essays that leverage natural experimental research designs, I advance new explanations for individual turnout, focused on citizens' access to, and experiences with the core electoral institutions of democracy. In paper 1 I show that policies focused on increasing access to elections can increase the size of the electorate, but also that they may carry compositional costs. Using new administrative data from South Africa and a difference-in-differences design, I show that the Independent Electoral Commission's large scale expansion of access to voting stations has increased national turnout by between 2.3 and 4.7 percentage points over the period 1999 to 2014. I then demonstrate, in the context of an administrative quasi-experiment, that those of high socio-economic status and those who are older are much more sensitive to electoral access than others. In paper 2 I explore whether differential representation in government shapes political behavior. I leverage the fact that the size of local government councils in South Africa follows a population-based formula with cutoffs that alter the degree of local representation. The results from a regression kink design suggest that at the margin the degree of representation is not particularly important for informing voters' decision to vote. Finally, paper 3 considers the effect of voting in South Africa's first democratic election in 1994 on future voting, and present evidence of the lasting behavioral effects of past participation using a regression discontinuity design. Eligibility to participate in 1994 affects future voting by 3 percentage points, with an average treatment effect of actually voting between 3.5 and 8.5 percentage points. I argue that persistence (or habituation) in voting behavior is at least partly driven by the creation of associations between first time voting and positive emotional s, by Daniel N. J. de Kadt., Paper 1: How electoral access encourages turnout but exacerbates political inequality -- Paper 2: Does local representation influence turnout? -- Paper 3: The long term consequences of participation in a first democratic election -- supplementary material for each paper., Ph. D.

Various theories of democratic governance posit that citizens should vote for incumbent politicians when they provide good service, and vote for the opposition when service delivery is poor. But does electoral accountability work as theorized, especially in developing country contexts? Studying Southern African democracies, where infrastructural investment in basic services has expanded widely but not universally, we contribute a new empirical answer to this question. Analyzing the relationship between service provision and voting, we find a surprising negative relationship: improvements in service provision predict decreases in support for dominant party incumbents. Though stronger in areas where opposition parties control local government, the negative relationship persists even in those areas where local government is run by the nationally dominant party. Survey data provides suggestive evidence that citizen concerns about corruption and ratcheting preferences for service delivery may be driving citizen attitudes and behaviors. Voters may thus be responsive to service delivery, but perhaps in ways that are more nuanced than extant theories previously recognized.

Cecil Rhodes’ policy reforms disenfranchised up to 15,000 mostly black and mixed-race voters in South Africa. This voter suppression created an unequal political environment that favoured white men 50 years before apartheid, write Daniel de Kadt and Joachim Wehner.

Democratic governments sometimes use violence against their people, yet little is known about the electoral consequences of these events. Studying South Africa's Marikana massacre, we document how a new opposition party formed as a direct result of violence, quantify significant electoral losses for the incumbent, and show that those losses were driven by voters switching from the incumbent to the new party. Three lessons emerge. First, incumbents who preside over state violence may be held electorally accountable by voters. Second, such accountability seemingly depends on the existence of credible opposition parties that can serve as a vector for disaffected voters. Where such parties do not exist, violence may create political cleavages that facilitate the formalization of opposition movements. Third, immediate proximity to violence is correlated with holding incumbents accountable.

A consistent finding in industrialized democracies is that having a daughter shapes parents' attitudes and behaviors in gender-egalitarian ways. We test whether this finding travels to a young middle-income democracy where women's rights are more tenuous: South Africa. Using a dataset of over 7,500 respondents with information on family structure, we find no discernible effect on attitudes about women's rights or on partisan identification. We speculate that our null findings relate to opportunity: daughter effects are more likely when parents perceive economic, social, and political opportunities for women. When women's customary status and de facto opportunities are low, as in South Africa, having a daughter may have no effect on parents' political behavior. Our results demonstrate the virtues of diversifying case selection in political behavior beyond economically wealthy democracies.