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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the relation between poverty levels and electoral participation in post-1991 Zambia

Paper long abstract:

By concentrating on electoral participation and poverty levels across provinces, this paper tries to provide an explanation to the fluctuating people attachment to party politics in post-1991 Zambia. Voter turnout will be analysed at the provincial level and a direct correlation between poverty and participation will be explored in order to detect its existence. In particular, since poverty levels were different between rural and urban provinces and governments have displayed different sensibilities towards urban and rural constituencies we would like to discover whether such differences do count for political participation. One of the major questions, indeed, which aroused recently in literature, is what drives African people to vote. While ethnic vote theory (Posner 2005) still dominates the debate a new trend in alternative explanations is gaining momentum. In the 00s, after the formation of the Patriotic Front (PF), a growing interest has been placed on inequalities and on the fight against poverty in electoral programmes of both governing party and the oppositions and through the policies enacted by governments with however ambiguous results in terms of voter turnout. In 2011, turnout rose moderately against 2008 elections, while rural constituencies did not show any significant difference in voter turnout against urban constituencies notwithstanding differences in poverty levels. So a combination of other factors seems to have been at work as well: an erosion of MMD approval after twenty years of uninterrupted hegemony and the ability of some emerging leaders to drive, as usual, the ethnic vote.