Who is Targeted? Coethnics, Copartisans, and Attitudes towards Legal Punishment of Clientelism

In ethnically diverse democracies of Sub-Saharan Africa, where parties often nest coalitions of ethnic groups, political actors are widely believed to engage in favoritism towards their supporters (``clientelism'') during electoral competition and public service delivery. However, we know little about what governs citizens' evaluations as to whether such behaviors should be illegal and punishable by the state. In this study, we hypothesize that citizens will award greater levels of punishment for clientelistic actions when: (a) the actor targets coethnics versus copartisans, and (b) the citizen holds the opposing ethnopartisanship with the actor. Additionally, we posit an interactive effect for greater punishment when coethnics are targeted by an actor with opposing ethnopartisanship. To test these hypotheses, we leverage a survey experiment in Kenya (n=1,946) sampling Kikuyus and Luos ahead of the 2017 national elections, that asks respondents to assign a level of punishment for a range of ``clientelistic'' behaviors targeting either coethnics or copartisans by a political actor with shared versus unshared ethnopartisanship. The question regarding whether the political clientele targeted as coethnics versus copartisans, as well as the identity of the perpetrator as having shared versus opposing ethnopartisanship, can help us understand the conditions under which elections and distributive politics generate politically-based tensions, discord, and even violence across groups that are widely regarded to destabilize society and the state.