Efforts to reduce political corruption often focus on stricter regulation of, and enhanced transparency about, political finance. Do voters favor such reforms, and do they reward (and punish) parties that enact (retrench) them? We examine these questions in South Africa, where the ruling African National Congress (ANC) introduced — and later effectively reversed— the Political Party Funding Act (PPFA), which de-anonymized donors and capped contributions. Using a nationally representative survey (N = 1800) with embedded experiments, we measure voter support for such regulations and test how information about the reform and its reversal shapes voter preferences. Although respondents generally express support for tighter regulations, they do not become more favorable toward the ANC after learning about the PPFA. Information about the reversal decreases declared ANC vote intention by around 5 percentage points. Auxiliary tests suggest that voters' doubts about the enforceability of the Act may explain the limited positive updating.

Democratic governments sometimes use violence against their people, yet little is know 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 physical or social proximity to violence is correlated with holding incumbents accountable.

Having a daughter shapes parents' attitudes and behaviors in gender-egalitarian ways, a finding documented in multiple industrialized democracies. We test whether this travels to a young middle-income democracy where women's rights are tenuous: South Africa. Contrary to prior work we find no discernible effect on attitudes about women's rights or partisan identification. Using a unique dataset of over 7,500 respondents and an equivalence testing approach, we reject the null hypothesis of any effects of 5 percentage points or greater at conventional levels of statistical significance. 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 factor 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.

Elites worldwide have used a variety of indirect tools to exclude specific racial groups from the electorate when laws or constitutions prevented them from doing so directly. Yet because voter registers rarely capture race, how these tools affect the composition of the electorate remains unclear. We contribute foundational micro-evidence from newly digitized archival data for all 135,457 voters registered in the Cape Colony (South Africa) in 1903, including their racial classification. We examine franchise restrictions introduced by Prime Minister Cecil Rhodes a decade earlier, and find they reduced registered voters of color by at least one third relative to white voters, likely shifting crucial election outcomes. Tracing how race, class, and geography intersect at the individual level, we find increased property requirements had the largest impact. This reveals a trade-off between the breadth and precision of different tools of racial disenfranchisement, with consequences for the socioeconomic composition of the electorate.

Political Leadership in Africa: Leaders and Development South of the Sahara. By Giovanni Carbone and Alessandro Pellegata. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 390p. 34.99 paper. - Political Violence in Kenya: Land, Elections, and Claim-Making. By Kathleen Klaus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 372p. $120.00 cloth. - Rural Democracy: Elections and Development in Africa. By Robin Harding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 192p. $155.00 cloth. - Volume 19 Issue 3

We study the demographic and economic correlates of the 1918 influenza or "Spanish flu" that killed an estimated 6% of South Africa's population. While the pandemic has received some attention in South African historiography and from social scientists in other contexts, little is known about its long-term impact on the country. Bringing together data from a range of new sources, including population and agricultural censuses, household surveys, and the voters' rolls, we provide analyses that show, first, the factors that (do and do not) predict flu mortality across South Africa's magisterial districts, and, second, suggest some important consequences of the flu. Our results reveal a large but short-lived demographic shock, and detectable, if small scale, long-term economic consequences.

Psychological research shows that social comparison of individuals with peers or others shapes attitude formation 1 , 2 . Opportunities for such comparisons have increased with global inequality 3 , 4 ; everyday experiences can make economic disparities more salient through signals of social class 5 , 6 . Here we show that, among individuals with a lower socioeconomic status, such local exposure to inequality drives support for the redistribution of wealth. We designed a placebo-controlled field experiment conducted in South African neighbourhoods in which individuals with a low socioeconomic status encountered real-world reminders of inequality through the randomized presence of a high-status car. Pedestrians were asked to sign a petition to increase taxes on wealthy individuals to help with the redistribution of wealth. We found an increase of eleven percentage points in the probability of signing the petition in the presence of inequality, when taking into account the experimental placebo effect. The placebo effect suppresses the probability that an individual signs the petition in general, which is consistent with evidence that upward social comparison reduces political efficacy 4 . Measures of economic inequality were constructed at the neighbourhood level and connected to a survey of individuals with a low socioeconomic status. We found that local exposure to inequality was positively associated with support for a tax on wealthy individuals to address economic disparities. Inequality seems to affect preferences for the redistribution of wealth through local exposure. However, our results indicate that inequality may also suppress participation; the political implications of our findings at regional or country-wide scales therefore remain uncertain.

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 provide 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.

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Does democratization increase economic output? Answers to this question are inconsistent partly due to the challenges of examining the causal forces behind political and economic phenomena that occur at the national level. We employ a new empirical approach, the synthetic control method, to study the economic effects of democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1975–2008. This method yields case-specific causal estimates, which show that political reform associated with the “third wave” of democracy had highly heterogeneous, yet often substantively important effects in Africa. In some countries democratization adversely affected economic output while in others it exerted an analogous positive effect.

Attempts to increase electoral access are generally seen as unambiguously desirable in new democracies. While these policies can increase the size of the electorate, they may also carry costs through changing electorate composition, by differentially enfranchising those who are highly sensitive to costs. Using new administrative data from South Africa and a difference-in-differences design, I show that a 15 year, large scale, expansion of access to voting stations increased national turnout by between 2.3 and 4.7 percentage points. In the context of a natural quasi-experiment, I then use 39,000 survey respondents geo-referenced to their nearest voting station to document that those of high socioeconomic status, and those who are older, are much more sensitive to electoral access than others. This may affect electorate composition in favor of those already economically or politically powerful, who also happen to be more opposed to redistributive public policies and have particular partisan preferences.

How does local economic inequality affect the preferences and behaviors of the poor? We present a placebo-controlled field experiment conducted in Soweto, South Africa, that randomly varies exposure to inequality in low socio-economic settings. We find that willingness to sign a petition that calls for higher taxes on the wealthy increases in the presence of a high-status car. To probe the generality of the experimental finding, we combine a representative geo-referenced survey with neighborhood-level census-derived measures of local inequality, a proxy for direct encounters with tangible reminders of economic inequality. Observationally, exposure to inequality among the poor is associated with an increase in support for taxing the wealthy.

How does local demographic context shape political behavior? We investigate how racial isolation, one of the natural consequences of structural segregation, is related to racial voting in South Africa. Using a variety of new datasets, which include for the first time high resolution census data from before the end of apartheid , we leverage plausibly exogenous variation in the extent to which local segregation persisted after the end of apartheid to study this relationship. Whites who are more isolated engage in more racial voting, measured as the probability of voting along racial lines, against black political parties. Using geo-referenced survey data for over 39,000 people we then present individual level evidence consistent with our findings, and discuss potential mechanisms.

In a developing democracy, can elections change the behavior of participating citizens? I study 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. 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. Given low turnout rates, these effects account for 7%–20% of the size of the electorate. To explain this result, I propose a theoretical explanation that draws on psychological research—affective experience habituation. 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 states. This theory is tested within the context of the 1994 election by exploiting variation in electoral experiences.