Voter Pessimism and Electoral Accountability: Experimental Evidence from Kenya

The chapter combines novel survey, audit, and experimental data to illustrate how voter pessimism can undermine electoral accountability. It reconciles mixed findings in the literature by highlighting two conditions under which anti-corruption information campaigns are likely to improve electoral accountability: (1) voters have sufficient information about politician performance and (2) voters are not too pessimistic about the quality of the political class. The treatment provided factual information from audits of incumbent performance on Constituency Development Fund spending. Before treatment, public opinion data from Afrobarometer and Ipsos Synovate indicate that Kenyan voters believe that almost all politicians are corrupt. The treatment has no impact on voter beliefs about their own incumbent, but improves perceptions of the political class for voters who find out that their incumbent is clean. The findings suggest that although voter judgments about incumbent performance tend to be fixed, voter pessimism towards the political class does update with factual information.