From the Great Lakes to the Great Rift Valley: Does Strategic Economic Policy Explain the 2009 Malawi Election?

Ethno-regional voting cleavages have featured in a number of sub-Saharan
African states during the third wave of democratization following the
end of the Cold War.While the causes and consequences of these cleavages
are well studied, there have been surprisingly few attempts to
understand how strategies of pan-ethnic or pan-regional coalition
building based on distributive economic policies could be employed to
secure national electoral coalitions. In this paper we examine if in the
2009 Malawian parliamentary elections the newly-formed national party,
the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), led by the President Binguwa
Mutharika used its incumbent position to promote an economic policy
based on food security in order to overcome traditional ethno-regional
voting patterns and win a nationwide electoral majority. After
presenting a formal model of a optimal allocation of an economic
resource to overcome ethnic bias and induce vote-switching, we use
district-level data in a system of equations to analyze if strategic
allocation within the national fertilizer subsidy program contributed to
the nation-wide electoral victory of the DPP.