Pulling for the party: Electoral campaign targeting and local information in Zimbabwe

How do party activists devise strategies to target different types of voters? We build on a rich body of previous work that seeks to understand how social networks shape party activist strategies to understand which voters are targeted and with what inducements. We argue that past research is largely mixed and inconclusive because it focuses on attributes of the voters rather than the attributes of the voters that are known to party activists . To address this gap, we present a theory that directly considers the role of local information in conditioning inducement targeting, and then test it using original data around Zimbabwe's 2023 elections. We find that information does condition the types of inducements voters receive, especially regarding the dissemination of non-clientelist as well as economic clentelist inducements.