Pulling for the Party: the impact of party foot soldiers on voter behaviour in Zimbabwe’s polarised political space

This project aims to develop and test a theory of how electoral behaviour is determined by parties, individual voters, and their interaction: how do voters and party foot soldiers interact? And what impact does this interaction have on electoral outcomes, namely vote choice and turnout. The project uses a panel survey of households in Harare and Bulawayo to investigate these questions. We focus here on those living and/or working in urban informality. Given the poor economic conditions in the country, the vast majority of the urban population lives in poor conditions and works in the informal sector. The vast majority of those in the informal sector work as street vendors - buying small amounts of goods, which are sold on the streets. We focus on this population as it is a large segment of the urban population and is one that has frequently found itself in opposition to the ruling party. We seek to explain how the ruling party’s influence on informality shapes political behavior for those living in informality. This is also an important population to study given our focus on positive and negative inducements. The literature has found that positive inducements (e.g. vote buying) is primarily used among the poorer population and while it is still an open question as to whether or not negative inducements like violence are more common among the poor (Mares and Young 2016), there is evidence that this is the case in Zimbabwe (Young 2015).