Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses what Tanzania’s rural population centres tell us about the county’s urban-rural political divide. It analyses the significance of these places as information conduits and sites of opposition activity in constituencies which tend to be dominated by the incumbents.

Paper long abstract:

Tanzania's ruling party continue to control a significant majority of rural constituencies at a time when opposition candidates have been able to win parliamentary seats in most large towns and cities. This paper begins by discussing the major causal factors behind this trend that has been gaining momentum over the last two decades. Two of these factors - the fact that rural voters have access to little information critical of the government, and opposition parties' difficulties in projecting themselves outside urban areas - are of particular interest when considering the rapidly growing population centres in Tanzania's rural constituencies.

As sites of in-migration, and because they form trade and transport hubs, rural population centres are generally places where the flow of information is high. They also tend to have a relatively strong opposition presence. These more typically urban characteristics highlight the shortcomings of using constituency boundaries to demarcate an urban-rural divide. Crucially, these centres are also well connected to the rest of their districts and act as conduits for flows of political information into smaller villages. This process already occurs on a small scale, both organically and as the result of deliberate opposition strategy. In the long-run, it has the potential to challenge some of the dynamics which have, up to this point, supported the government's electoral dominance of rural areas.