Publication

This paper examines the effect that geography can have on voter patterns in Africa by looking at differences in voting behavior in urban and rural areas. More specifically, the authors focus on Government-to-Opposition Swing (GOS) in these areas, which happens when an electoral constituency that voted for an incumbent in one election withdraws that support and votes for an opposition party in a second election. They find that the likelihood of GOS not only differs from urban to rural areas, but also among different types of rural constituencies. They also find that GOS is 1) more common in urban areas and highly populated rural areas; and 2) less common in home regions of presidents and in sparsely populated regions. They then argue that what these findings show is that electoral and voting behavior varies across geographic regions in a country.