Young populations in young democracies: generational voting behaviour in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Why do young Africans participate less in elections than their older counterparts? Given Africa's growing youth bulge, this constituency represents a numerically important voting bloc, and their lower participation in elections could undermine the legitimacy of the region's democratic trajectory. We address this question through a multi-level model that relies on individual-level data from the Afrobarometer surveys and country-level data for 19 of the region's more democratic countries. We classify Africa's youth as belonging to two categories, those aged 18–24 and those aged 25–35. We find that key determinants of the youth's voting behaviour include their access to political knowledge and information as well as their perceptions of the electoral context and party system. In the latter regard, the efficacy and fairness of elections and the degree of partisanship increase the youth's decision to vote, while the length of party incumbency is a deterrent to turnout. These findings hold important implications by highlighting that Africa's youth not only need to be exposed to greater fora for learning about the political process and party options but also that political parties in the region need to become more relevant to this constituency.

Keywords:

• Africa
• democracy
• elections
• partisanship
• voting
• youth

Notes on contributors

Danielle Resnick is a research fellow at the United Nations University-World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER). She works on political parties, voting behaviour, and the political economy of development, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Her book, Urban Poverty and Party Populism in African Democracies, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Daniela Casale is a senior research fellow in Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her expertise is in the area of labour and household economics, with a particular focus on South Africa. Her research has been published in a variety of journals, including Economic Development and Cultural Change and the Journal of African Economies.

Notes

1. Nie, Verba, and Kim, “Political Participation”; Norris, Democratic Phoenix; and Wattenberg, Is Voting for Young People?

2. Franklin, Voter Turnout; see also Blais and Dobrynska, “Turnout.”

3. Howe, “Political Knowledge.”

4. For example, Franklin, Voter Turnout; and Plutzer, “Becoming a Habitual Voter.”

5. Wattenberg, Is Voting for Young People?, 6.

6. “Africa” refers solely to sub-Saharan Africa.

7. World Bank, World Development Report 2007.

8. See UN-DESA, World Population Ageing, 2009.

9. Bratton, Chu, and Lagos, “Who Votes?”; and Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion.

10. See Molomo, “Understanding Government”; and Villalón, “Democratizing.”

11. See Manning, “Assessing African Party Systems”; and van de Walle, “Presidentialism.”

12. For example, Rakner and van de Walle, “Opposition Weakness.”

13. More information can be found at http://www.afrobarometer.org.

14. The Round 4 surveys also include Zimbabwe. However, we felt that this country did not represent an electoral democracy in the same way as the other countries in the sample.

15. While we would ideally be interested in determinants of turnout over time, a lack of consistency in the questions asked across rounds of Afrobarometer precludes such an analysis.

16. See Curtain, “Youth and Employment”; Gavin, “Africa's Restless Youth”; and Smith, “Youth in Africa.”

17. For example, Honwana, The Time of Youth.

18. For more detailed sociological and anthropological analyses of Africa's youth, see Hansen, “Getting Stuck”; Honwana, Time of Youth; and Sommers, “Urban Youth.”

19. Gavin, “Africa's Restless Youth,” 220.

20. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth, 16.

21. Fuller, “The Demographic Backdrop,” 151–4.

22. Goldstone, “The New Population Bomb.”

23. Austin, Politics in Ghana.

24. Bratton, Chu, and Lagos, “Who Votes?”

25. See EU, “Déclaration préliminaire.”

26. Hofmeyr, “Is Democracy Dated?”

27. Parry, Moyser, and Day, Political Participation.

28. Fuchs and Klingemann, “Citizens and the State.”

29. See Chan and Clayton, “Should the Voting Age be Lowered”; Park, “Young People”; and Russell et al., Voter Engagement.

30. Banks and Ullah, “Political Attitudes.”

31. Howe, “Electoral Participation.”

32. Blais et al., “Where Does Turnout Decline”; Wattenberg, Is Voting for Young People?; Dalton, The Good Citizen.

33. For example, Putnam, “Tuning In.”

34. Norris, “Does Television Erode Social Capital?”

35. Wattenberg, Is Voting for Young People?

36. See Gimpel, Lay, and Schuknecht, Cultivating Democracy; and Verba, Lehman Schlozman, and Burns, “Family Ties.”

37. Verba and Nie, Participation; and Verba, Lehman Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality.

38. Dalton, Citizen Politics: Public Opinion.

39. Putnam, Making Democracy Work.

40. Van Egmond, De Graaf, and Van der Eijk, “Electoral Participation”; and Verba, Lehman Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality.

41. Texeira, The Disappearing American Voter.

42. McFarland and Thomas, “Bowling Young.”

43. Fiorina, “Information and Rationality.”

44. Dalton, “The Decline of Party Identification.”

45. Anderson, “Electoral Supply”; and Dalton, “The Decline Party Identification.”

46. van der Brug, “Structural and Ideological Voting.”

47. Kriesi et al., “Globalization.”

48. Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization.

49. Henn, Weinstein, and Wring, “A Generation Apart?”

50. See Franklin, Voter Turnout; and Riker and Ordeshook, “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting.”

51. Johnston, Matthews, and Bittner, “Alienation.”

52. Blais and Rubenson, “The Source of Turnout Decline.”

53. Campbell et al., The Voter Decides, 187.

54. Blais and Rubenson, “The Source of Turnout Decline”.

55. See World Bank, Youth and Employment in Africa.

56. Posner and Young, “The Institutionalization of Political Power in Africa.”

57. EU, Zambia Final Report.

58. See http://www.elections.org.zm/media/presidential_totalsummary_2006.pdf. We compare 2011 with 2006 turnout because in the 2008 elections the Electoral Commission refused to re-open the electoral register, so the ultimate turnout figure was biased.

59. Commonwealth Secretariat, Zambia General Elections, 11.

60. Commonwealth Secretariat, Malawi General Elections.

61. Cited in Meldrum, “The Young Prove Immune to Election Fever.”

62. Mattes, “The ‘Born Frees.’”

63. For example, Bratton, “Political Participation”; Kuenzi and Lambright, “Who Votes in Africa?”; and Kuenzi and Lambright, “Voter Turnout.”

64. Kittilson and Anderson, “Electoral Supply”; and Blais and Rubenson, “The Source of Turnout Decline.”

65. The regressions are estimated using Generalized Linear Latent and Mixed Models (GLLAMM) in STATA and incorporate survey weights at both the country and individual levels. This modelling approach introduces a random intercept term for the countries, controlling for the likelihood that individual observations within countries are not independent of each other.

66. Afrobarometer does not collect data on actual birth dates. Our approach excludes individuals who turned 18 in the months prior to the election, but we believe that this is more appropriate than including individuals who were not eligible.

67. Bratton, “Poor People and Democratic Citizanship.”

68. Other analyses of turnout in Africa have examined internal political efficacy, using a question about whether respondents understand how government works (see Kuenzi and Lambright, “Who Votes in Africa?”). However, this question was not included in Round 4.

69. For instance, few Kenyans in Round 4 believe that their 2007 elections were “free and fair” but many more believe that elections generally allow citizens to remove disliked leaders.

70. Bratton, “Political Participation.”

71. See Kuenzi and Lambright, “Who Votes in Africa?”; and Sommers, “Urban Youth.”

72. One oft-used measure of party competitiveness, point spread during the election, is highly endogenous to turnout (see Geys, “Explaining Voter Turnout”). As such, we felt that incumbent advantage provided a useful alternative measure.

73. Salih and Nordlund, Political Parties in Africa.

74. There are five countries where this is relevant: Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, South Africa, and Uganda.

75. For example, Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections; Remmer, “The Political Impact”; and Roberts and Wibbels, “Party Systems.”

76. Posner and Simon, “Economic Conditions.”

77. See Fornos, Power, and Garand, “Explaining Voter Turnout”; Geys, “Explaining Voter Turnout”; and Kuenzi and Lambright, “Voter Turnout”. Our data is from Reynolds, Reilly, and Ellis, Electoral System Design, and the ACE Electoral Project (see http://aceproject.org/).

78. Kittilson and Anderson, “Electoral Supply and Voter Turnout.”

79. Laakso and Taagepera, “Effective Number of Parties.” This index is calculated by dividing one by the summation of the square of each party's proportion of all votes. We calculated the effective number of parties from the African Elections Database (see http://africanelections.tripod.com/). Except for the parliamentary systems of Botswana, Lesotho, and South Africa, the calculation is based on the results from presidential elections.

80. This variable is based on data from International Foundation for Electoral Systems (see http://www.electionguide.org/) and Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (see http://www.eisa.org.za/).

81. Electoral volatility had a variance inflation factor of 4.3 when included in our model with the effective number of parties.

82. When we included this variable in our models without the control for the effective number of parties we found no substantive changes to our results.

83. Kuenzi and Lambright, “Who Votes in Africa?”

84. Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion.

85. Elsewhere, it has been shown that one factor that in turn affects partisanship is whether a respondent shares the same ethnicity as the incumbent candidate. See Resnick and Casale, “The Political Participation of Africa's Youth.”

86. Howe, “Electoral Participation.”

87. See Bratton, Chu, and Lagos, “Who Votes?”

88. See Evrensel, Voter Registration in Africa.

89. Karp and Brockington, “Social Desirability.”

90. Katz and Katz, “Correcting for Survey Misreports.”

91. See Dalton, Citizen Politics in Western Democracies.

92. See Nie, Verba, and Kim, “Political Participation.”

93. For example, Juma, “Why Africa Needs to Lower its Voting Age to 16.”

94. Gavin, “Africa's Restless Youth,” 222.