24Received 07.07.2024. Revised 10.08.2024. Accepted 30.09.2024.
Acknowledgements. The article was prepared within the framework of the grant provided by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (Grant Agreement no. 075-15-2022-327 dated 04.22.2022).
Abstract. The article examines the nationalization of voting in presidential elections in Sub-Saharan African countries in order to explain the emergence of national leaders with fairly homogeneous support of ethnic and regional groups of the electorate. The authors demonstrate the absence of a unidirectional process of nationalization, suggesting the continued fragility of African statehood under fundamental conditions of high ethno-linguistic fractionalization. The study confirms the crucial role of the incumbency effect, which strengthens support for a country’s leader when elected for a new term due to favorable institutional environment, but reveals other factors as well. One of them is the economic success of the incumbent, which contributes to the growing uniformity of his/her territorial support while economic failures have an opposite effect. The incumbent’s efficiency in ensuring public security and especially in forming elite coalitions across the different areas of the state might also be important. Given the initial shortage of national leaders in African countries due to the nature of their statehood, these reasons while coming into play under fairly democratic conditions contribute to the artificial “construction” of national leadership, which can be quite successful although temporary. At the same time, success of nationalization is more related to certain states (such as Ghana or Senegal) than to personalities, indicating that the structural characteristics of political systems are more important than the personal characteristics of agents. However, when the factors noted above do not work properly or pose threats to incumbents because of their failures, basic ethno-regional differences in Africa come back into full force.
Keywords: party system nationalization, ethnolinguistic fractionalization, national leader, coalition strategies, ethnic voting, economic voting, president, elections, Africa
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