Partisan Bias in a Weak-Party System: Evidence from Kenya

Partyism---intergroup hostility along partisan lines---has been shown to be surprisingly strong relative to the underlying social divisions in several mature democracies. Less is known about partisan bias in weak-party systems where parties are less institutionalized and volatility is greater. This study examines partisan bias in Kenya, where parties are often made and remade in advance of each election. Results from survey-based measures and behavioral games show that partisan bias is substantively large both in absolute terms and in relation to measures of ethnic bias. The comparison with ethnic bias is particularly instructive given that Kenya is often described as a context where ethnicity is more central to politics than partisanship. We draw two conclusions. First, partyism can emerge in the absence of durable partisan identities, requiring more minimal conditions than implied in prior research. Second, explicitly priming partisan alignments can make core ethnic cleavages consequential in behavioral games.