Urban Incumbent Hostility

Abstract This chapter is the first of two that provide quantitative cross-national evidence to support the book’s central theoretical claim. Responding directly to the puzzle of urban incumbent hostility discussed in Chapter 2, this chapter evaluates the expectation that the lower proclivity of urbanites to support incumbents and express satisfaction with democracy should be conditional on levels of urbanization. More specifically, analysis of public opinion data from twenty-eight countries across Africa shows that urban hostility towards incumbents and dissatisfaction with democracy are not only robust to a variety of potentially confounding factors but are decreasing with urbanization. The data come from multiple rounds of the Afrobarometer Survey Series, enabling the use of fixed effects models to estimate robust within-country effects by leveraging changes to urbanization over time. These findings are important because, as highlighted in Chapter 2, the expectation that urban incumbent hostility should be conditional on urbanization is a unique observable implication of the book’s argument. Although scholars have put forward a variety of reasons for why urbanites across Africa should be less likely than rural residents to support incumbents, none of these alternative explanations account for the conditional effects demonstrated in this chapter. As such, this evidence supports the theoretical claim that electoral competition leads African governments to pursue pro-rural development policies.