Getting Out the Vote, Uganda Style: Social and Political Context and Turnout in an African Election
Professor Karen Ferree, Political Science, UCSD
We use a randomized field experiment to evaluate the effects of mobilization and community pressures on the turnout decisions of African residents of a Kampala suburb during the February 2011 Ugandan elections. We embedded contact, visibility, and control treatments in a short survey which we randomly assigned and delivered to around 1100 individual registered voters a few days prior to the election. We then re-visited all participants during the days immediately following the election to inspect their fingers for ink. We find that contact did not appreciably affect turnout while raising awareness of the visibility of voting lowered turnout, and that it especially lowered the turnout of women, with unmarried women showing the largest negative effects. Our experiment reveals the importance of political and social context on voting behavior. Our findings also suggests that fear of sanctioning varies across individuals in important ways, with more vulnerable members of communities more sensitive than less vulnerable members to interventions that raise the visibility of voting.
Professor Karen Ferree (Political Science, UCSD) studies the politics of democracy, elections, and ethnicity, particularly in the context of the developing countries of Africa. She has done field research in South Africa twice, the results of which are presented in her dissertation, Voters and Parties in the Rainbow Nation: Race and Elections in the New South Africa . She also is working on several papers that look at the political economy of elections in Africa and has interests in political methodology, particularly ecological inference and time series cross sectional analysis.