ASCL Seminar: Regionalism Reconsidered: Economic inequalities and territorial oppositions in African politics

Location to be announced. Do socio-economic cleavages shape electoral dynamics in African countries? Individual-level and party systems research since the 1990s has suggested that the answer is "no." Focusing on a number of countries in East and West Africa, this paper offers a spatial analysis of geographic patterns in constituency-level voting over three decades. It reveals the existence of persistent regional voting blocs that, in their temporal stability and multiethnic character, are not well explained by prevailing theory. The anomalies open the door to a reinterpretation of national electoral structure and dynamics that takes the geographic clustering of the persistent voting blocs as a clue to their etiology.  Prof. Catherine Boone (LSE) proposes an interpretation that follows Lipset & Rokkan's (1967) classic model of territorial oppositions in countries undergoing economic integration and bureaucratic centralisation. Socio-economic cleavages rooted in regional inequalities and sectoral differentiation appear to be more salient in African electoral politics since the 1990s than many scholars have realised. Speaker: Prof. Catherine Boone. Click here to register for this event

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