Electoral clientelism as status affirmation in Africa: evidence from Ghana

Why does electoral clientelism persist when ballots are secret and elections are competitive? The provision of material rewards during campaigns is seen as the standard way politicians secure votes in ‘patronage democracies’. Yet monitoring clientelistic bargains is difficult when voting is secret, several competitors may provide material inducements simultaneously, voters view such inducements as gifts and not obligations, and candidates' records are more credible signals of future performance. I argue that where elections are competitive and voters expect gifts, candidates engage in a two-pronged strategy: affirm their own status through public displays of wealth, and undermine opponents' rewards by matching inducements or encouraging voters to break reciprocity norms. In result, neither side's gifts are sufficient for a win, and parties are forced to pursue different linkage mechanisms to voters. One such mechanism involves defining and targeting broader constituencies through policy proposals. Micro-level data from Ghana confirm these expectations. The theory is better suited to environments where candidates' past records are known to constituents than existing explanations, and accounts for the apparent contradiction between the ubiquity of campaign clientelism in Sub-Saharan Africa and recent empirical findings that performance evaluations and non-contingent incentives matter most to voters