This paper firstly sets out to re-examine scholarly construals of ‘vote-buying’ as the literal purchase of votes with financial or other material inducements, often by the candidate or party that bids highest. Secondly, it reconsiders a dominant distinction in comparative politics, often attributed to Kitschelt (2000), between ‘programmatic’, ‘personality’ and ‘patronage’ based strategies of political mobilization.
The governorship election held in Ekiti State in southwestern Nigeria on June 24, 2014, offers a useful case through which to explore these issues. The challenger, Mr. Ayodele Fayose, a previously impeached governor, decisively defeated the sitting governor, Dr Kayode Fayemi, despite both the latter’s advantage of being the incumbent and, in particular, his reputation as a reformer. Popular accounts following the announcement of the polling results emphasized that cash and other gifts items had been exchanged to an unprecedented degree even for the typical Nigerian election, in which the giving of cash or other gifts to voters is considered a norm of political behavior (Bratton 2008). From these popular accounts emerged the term 'stomach infrastructure', which referred to the immediate and basic needs of the electorate such as food and the view that Fayose, through giving out more money and food during his campaign, proved to be more cognizant of these needs than did the incumbent governor, Fayemi. According to this view, Fayemi’s reputation for being more concerned with policy debates and good-governance priorities (such as the construction of real infrastructure) rather than “stomach infrastructure” had cost him his seat. These accounts, moreover, chimed with scholarly depictions of vote-buying and clientelism as both indispensable for electoral victory and more appealing than policy debates to (particularly poorer) African electorates.
This paper draws on data gathered among day laborers and party activists in Ado-Ekiti, the capital of Ekiti State, to assess the perceptions of a poorer urban constituency on the relationship between pre-electoral gift-giving, programmatic debates, and political allegiance. Drawing on existing scholarship problematizing the ontology of vote-buying (Schedler and Schaffer 2002, Björkman 2014) I argue that candidate’s varied approaches to pre-electoral gift-giving were understood by poor voters in Ekiti not as offers for their votes based on market exchange, but rather as ‘signs of virtue’. Thus, what mattered for voters was how gifts were given and not how much they were offered. I also argue that theses personal styles and ‘signs of virtue’ implicit in gift-exchanges were understood as symbolic of the rival policy preferences of the main challengers, a proposition that complicates clear distinctions between personality, patronage, and policy or programmatic based strategies. Although transaction vote-buying distinguishable from policy or personality based appeals may occur, this paper’s argument emphasizes the need for methodologies cognizant to alternative understandings of pre-electoral gift-giving.