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The Strategic Shuffle: Ethnic Geography, the Internal Security Apparatus, and Elections in Kenya

The Strategic Shuffle: Ethnic Geography, the Internal Security Apparatus, and Elections in Kenya For autocrats facing elections, officers in the internal security apparatus play a crucial role by engaging in coercion on behalf of the incumbent. Yet reliance on these officers introduces a principal‐agent problem: Officers can shirk from the autocrat's demands. To solve this problem, autocrats strategically post officers to different areas based on an area's importance to the election and the expected loyalty of an individual officer, which is a function of the officer's expected benefits from the president winning reelection. Using a data set of 8,000 local security appointments within Kenya in the 1990s, one of the first of its kind for any autocracy, I find that the president's coethnic officers were sent to, and the opposition's coethnic officers were kept away from, swing areas. This article demonstrates how state institutions from a country's previous authoritarian regime can persist despite the introduction of multi‐party elections and thus prevent full democratization. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American Journal of Political Science Wiley

The Strategic Shuffle: Ethnic Geography, the Internal Security Apparatus, and Elections in Kenya

Hassan, Mai
American Journal of Political Science , Volume 61 (2) – Apr 1, 2017
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Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
©2017 by the Midwest Political Science Association
ISSN
0092-5853
eISSN
1540-5907
DOI
10.1111/ajps.12279
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

For autocrats facing elections, officers in the internal security apparatus play a crucial role by engaging in coercion on behalf of the incumbent. Yet reliance on these officers introduces a principal‐agent problem: Officers can shirk from the autocrat's demands. To solve this problem, autocrats strategically post officers to different areas based on an area's importance to the election and the expected loyalty of an individual officer, which is a function of the officer's expected benefits from the president winning reelection. Using a data set of 8,000 local security appointments within Kenya in the 1990s, one of the first of its kind for any autocracy, I find that the president's coethnic officers were sent to, and the opposition's coethnic officers were kept away from, swing areas. This article demonstrates how state institutions from a country's previous authoritarian regime can persist despite the introduction of multi‐party elections and thus prevent full democratization.

Journal

American Journal of Political Science – Wiley

Published: Apr 1, 2017

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