A State of Change: The Kenyan State after Multi-Party Elections

Abstract

How do autocrats win elections? A powerful option is to use the state to coerce and coopt the population for support. The territorial nature of the state allows an autocrat to vary patterns of cooptation and coercion across a country either by implementing different rules to different places, or by applying the same rules differently in each location. The existing administrative arrangements an autocrat inherits from her predecessors, however, may not be best suited for an autocrat's ethnic geography - or the importance of different ethnic groups to the incumbent staying in power and their locations across the country - as she faces re-election. With the backdrop of donor-pressure for state reforms in the developing world since the 1980s, autocrats have found an enabling environment to change the state to better match their ethnic geography. Autocrats within competitive authoritarian regimes pursue reforms that target cooptation and/or coercion through the state to an area based on its expected level of support in an attempt to tilt the playing field and win re-election. I develop the argument through a set of sub-national analyses on two fundamental aspects of the state - administrative unit creation and management of officers in the internal security apparatus - in Kenya since the country's return to multi-party elections in 1992. I use records on administrative units, officer management, census data, elite interviews and archival material. The results show that incumbents since 1992 have attempted to coerce and coopt unaligned ethnic groups, those without a co-ethnic in the race nor who have lined up behind a viable challenger, and that these efforts have increased the incumbent's local vote share. More broadly, this work helps explain both the precipitous and widespread state reforms in recent decades in the developing world, and their lackluster results. These state-building reforms have not resulted in more efficient states as originally intended, but they have made competitive authoritarian regimes more durable.