Mobile phone users as pseudo-brokers in clientelism: evidence from Africa

ABSTRACT

Despite a vast literature on clientelism, the impact of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) on clientelistic exchanges remains understudied. In order to fill that gap, we examine whether politicians disproportionately direct private transfers to mobile phone users, who can easily share persuasive messages with their communication partners and thus provide cascading benefits. Analyzing data from the fifth wave of the Afrobarometer survey, we find that mobile phone users are indeed more likely to be targeted and that their chances of being targeted decrease as their feeling of being monitored rises. In addition, the attractiveness of mobile phone users is salient only in urban areas, and mobile phone users are more likely to persuade others to vote for a certain politician upon receiving private transfers. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings regarding the existence of pseudo-brokers and the impact of ICT on the quality of democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• Clientelism
• information and communications technology
• mobile phone
• elections
• Africa

Highlights

• We examine whether or not politicians target mobile phone users to buy votes.

• Data from the fifth wave of the Afrobarometer survey are analyzed.

• We find that mobile phone users are more likely to be targeted.

• However, their feeling of being monitored decreases the chance of being targeted.

• Private transfers encourage mobile phone users’ electoral persuasion of others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Given that persuasion often fails due to affective, cognitive, and contextual reasons (Eagly & Chaiken, 1984; Greenwald, 1968; Wood, 2000), a mobile phone user’s rich knowledge about her communication partners increases her accuracy in identifying those who are potentially persuadable and efficiency in persuading them (DeMarzo et al., 2003).

² Given the effect of monitoring on persuasion activity, one may be curious about why politicians would ever develop monitoring capacity instead of relying on reciprocity. It is beyond the scope of this paper to fully examine the conditions under which a politician would develop monitoring capacity because the decision to monitor is likely to be affected by diverse factors, including the strength of reciprocity norms and the degree to which the politician obtains help from local electoral officials (Callen & Long, 2014).

³ These countries are Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

⁴ According to the Afrobarometer data, Internet users heavily rely on mobile phones; 18.07% of respondents have ‘ever’ used the Internet (only 5.66% are daily users), and 95.38% of Internet users are mobile phone owners (Q91B). Our models presented here do not contain a variable for the frequency of using the Internet due to the risk of multicollinearity. The statistical results do not vary substantively when we control for Internet use.

⁵ We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising the issue of heterogeneity in domestic political and economic conditions. We believe that our analysis becomes more solid by addressing it directly.

⁶ See Appendix A for the construction of Member of community organization. The correlation coefficient between Mobile phone use and Member of community organization is weak at 0.06.

⁷ The discussion in this paragraph is deeply indebted to an anonymous reviewer.

⁸ Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) scores range between 1.00 (Ethnic identification) and 1.73 (Media consumption), which means that concerns about multicollinearity can be dismissed.

⁹ Additional analysis, reported in Appendix F, shows that clientelistic offers are negatively correlated with respondents’ preferences for democracy, agreement to the statement that democracy is a good way to select a leader, satisfaction with democracy in the country, and trust in the top political leader, parliament, and electoral commission. In contrast, clientelistic offers are positively correlated with their perceived corruption of governmental officials.