Abstract/Summary

Citizens’ political engagement is widely regarded as vital for democracy. From fundraising and campaigning to participatory budgeting and attending community meetings, non-electoral political participation is believed to increase the inclusion of citizens and accountability of politicians, encourage civic skills and virtues, improve policy, and increase the legitimacy of both the process and outcomes. In Africa, however, the assumption has often been that citizens do not engage robustly in many of these vital activities, with political participation primarily limited to voting. Thus, little research explores the drivers of these other activities. In this paper, we aim to fill the gap, using an original survey experiment to explore the drivers of citizen participation in Zambia around the 2021 national elections. Contrary to widely held views in the literature, we find that partisanship is a critical driver of this non-electoral activity, with social incentives and ethnicity also playing important but less significant roles. Finally, we seek to understand the mechanisms underpinning these results, finding that citizens anticipate sanctions if they fail to support a co-partisan but not a co-ethnic candidate. These findings have important implications for understanding political engagement and democratic development throughout the region.