Socioeconomic Status and Voting in Africa: A Closer Look

This chapter draws on Afrobarometer cross-national survey data spanning nearly two decades (1999–2021). It relies on a composite measure of social status that combines education, employment and material wealth to provide useful descriptive evidence to support the empirical puzzle that voting is inversely related to socioeconomic status in Africa. In particular, the chapter uncovers individuals at the lowest level of the SES index (resource-poor) are approximately 4% points more likely to vote than voters at the highest level of the SES index. Nonetheless, the chapter also demonstrates that the association between socioeconomic level and voting is not consistent across sub-Saharan Africa. For example, whereas resource-poor people vote more than resource-rich people in most nations, the reverse is true in some, with the resource-rich voting in greater numbers. Nonetheless, there is no difference in participation rates between resource-rich and resource-poor persons in some (few) countries. These variations suggest something to be explained, and the proceeding chapters (3, 4, 5, 6 and 7) offer empirical leverage with which to do so.