Abstract:

In dominant-party states, why do individuals vote in elections with foregone conclusions when they are neither bought nor coerced? I propose that a social norm of voting motivates turnout in these least-likely contexts. Motivated by the belief that regimes reward high turnout with public goods, citizens view elections as an opportunity for community-wide benefit and use social sanctions to enforce the norm. Using lab-in-the-field voting experiments together with survey data, I document the strong influence of a social norm of voting in two semi-authoritarian states in east Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. I find that norm compliance is driven by those most dependent on their local community. This project helps to explain high turnout in elections, individual-level variation in voting behavior, and authoritarian endurance. The results suggest that rather than government accountability, elections may instead be about local accountability to one's community.

Speaker Bio:

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Leah is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France and a research affiliate at MIT GOV/LAB. She received her PhD in political science from MIT in 2018. Leah studies political behavior in sub-Saharan Africa and examines questions of citizen engagement, compliance, and government accountability. Her current book project investigates how social norms of voting help to explain high turnout in dominant-party states in East Africa. She is also working on a project on urban informality in Lagos, Nigeria. Before starting graduate school, Leah worked as the program manager at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in Nigeria.

Abstract:

Using survey data from a variety of sources, I examine how multiple conceptions of American nationhood shaped respondents’ voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and how the election outcome built on long-term changes in the distribution of nationalist beliefs in the U.S. population. The results suggest that nationalist beliefs constituted important cultural cleavages that were effectively mobilized by candidates from both parties. In particular, exclusionary varieties of nationalism were associated with Trump support in the Republican primary and the general election, while disengagement from the nation was predictive of Sanders support in the Democratic primary. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, nationalism has become sorted by party: Republicans have become predominantly ethno-nationalist, while Democrats have increasingly embraced a creedal conception of nationhood. The resulting mutual reinforcement of nationalist cleavages with other sources of distinction is likely to shape future elections and threaten the stability of U.S. democracy.

Speaker Bio:

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Bart Bonikowski is Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Resident Faculty at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, a Faculty Affiliate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (where he co-directs the Research Cluster on Global Populism / Challenges to Democracy), and a 2018-19 Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Relying on survey methods, computational text analysis, and experimental research, his work applies insights from cultural sociology to the study of politics in the United States and Europe, with a particular focus on nationalism, populism, and the rise of the radical right. His research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, British Journal of Sociology, European Journal of Political Research, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Brown Journal of World Affairs, and a number of other peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.