Alexandra Blackman|Tribal Voting in New Democracies: Evidence from 6 Million Tunisian Voter Records

The Moynihan Institute’s new series, Study of Global Politics, welcomes Alexandra Blackman of Cornell University.

Do candidates who share a tribal identity with voters outperform candidates who do not? Considerable research has examined this question in the Middle East, but in many of these key cases autocratic regimes supported political institutions that reinforced tribal ties, making it hard to discern the independent effect of tribal identity on voter behavior.

We revisit this question in (at the time) democratic Tunisia, where post-independence governments tried to uproot tribal identity, making it a “least likely” case to uncover tribal influence on election outcomes. To estimate the effect of tribal influence on voting, we match an historical dictionary of Tunisian tribes to surnames from the universe of both registered voters and candidates from Tunisia’s recent local elections (2018).

We find preliminary evidence consistent with the claim that tribal affiliations do “matter”: lists whose candidates share a tribal identity with the underlying population consistently outperform lists who do not share this identity. Our work suggests that despite decades of policies designed to suppress tribes, tribal identity exerted a measurable effect on local politics during a period of democratic transition.

Alexandra Blackman is an assistant professor in Cornell University’s Department of Government. Her research interests include the relationship between political regimes and religious institutions, as well as the development of and appeal to religious identities in the political sphere, with a regional focus on the Middle East. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in, among others, the Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, and the Journal of Peace Research.