
Brief 44: Examining Ethnicity-Based Voting Under High & Low Information Settings in Benin
The study tests explanations for how take-up of information about a candidate’s performance is moderated by politician-citizen coethnicity. The authors find that citizens in Benin engage in ethnic motivated reasoning, contrary to two leading theories that might explain the interactive effect of information and ethnicity: that ethnicity is a signal for (1) candidate quality or (2) which groups will benefit or lose if the candidate is elected. Consistent with insights from social psychology, the study finds that voters increase and decrease support for incumbents in response to good and bad performance information only when they are motivated to by their ethnic group attachments.
Read Full StudyCategory: Elections
Tags: Benin, coethnic, ethnicity, voting behavior, representative democracy
Date of Publication: Wednesday, January 25, 2017
EGAP Researcher: Jessica Gottlieb, Claire Adida, Gwyneth McClendon, Eric Kramon
Geographical Region: Africa
Research Question:
Does increasing voters’ access to information reduce ethnic voting?
Preparer: Bhumi Purohit
According to theories of motivated reasoning, people process information in a way that allows them to maintain or improve their positive views of in-group members relative to out-group members. In American politics, this phenomenon can help explain why voters better respond to information when it supports or improves their partisan identities. Motivated reasoning, however, has not previously been used to account for the phenomenon of ethnic voting. Why do individuals repeatedly vote for candidates who share their own ethnicity? Much existing scholarship treats ethnic voting as a product of low-information environments, where ethnicity may be an important heuristic for judging candidate quality. Absent more detailed performance information, a candidate’s ethnicity may also be used to judge which ethnic groups will receive more goods and services if the candidate is elected. The authors tested these theories against the theory of motivated reasoning, which states that voters only respond to positive information when it is about a member of the same identity group, and negative information when it is about someone from a different identity group.
Research Design:
This study finds that voters respond to information about incumbents in a way that amplifies ethnicity-based voting, suggesting that a better-informed electorate will not reduce its reliance on ethnic cues. Related, the study finds that the provision of politician performance information changes voter behavior only when the information aligns with voters’ ethnic identity attachments. The study provides a basis for further work to understand whether and how it is feasible to reduce ethnically motivated voting in response to new information. The authors suggest that such ethnic polarization may be overcome by priming a larger, shared identity such as nationality, or by priming a cross-cutting identity (such as cousinage in Mali). Multiple studies on discrimination also find that making people more aware of their discriminatory biases reduces such bias.