For Everything There is a Season: Seasonality and Retrospective Voting in African Elections

Are African elections subject to seasonal effects? I argue that agricultural seasonality patterns election outcomes by influencing voters’ retrospective performance evaluations. When countries hold elections after harvests, voters reward incumbents. As the year continues and conditions worsen, voters begin to sour on incumbents. I construct a measure of agricultural seasons using satellite imagery and pair it with an original dataset of 145 executive-election results from 32 countries, as well as with over 100,000 Afrobarometer survey responses. I first show a curvilinear relationship between the time from harvest and support for incumbent executives. Initially, voter support for incumbents increases following a harvest, but this relationship eventually reverses before the next harvest. To account for endogenous election timing, I also examine quasi-experimental evidence from two Zambian by-elections triggered by the deaths of incumbents. Finally, I analyze survey responses to probe for causal mechanisms and find evidence of sociotropic rather than pocketbook voting.