Voter Behavior and Government Performance in Malawi: An Application of a Probabilistic Voting Model

This chapter integrates existing political economy approaches that explain the impact of voter behavior on government performance and advanced empirical voter studies that focus on voter behavior to derive theoretical hypotheses that will be empirically tested by estimating a probabilistic voter model for Malawi. In particular, we provide a theory that relates the relative importance of different voting motives for different social voter groups to induced electoral incentives for politicians and subsequently to government performance. Based on our theoretical model, we derive indices of government accountability and capture that are defined in political equilibrium and measure the government’s incentives to implement policies that serve pure self-interest or special interests at the expense of the general public. Based on the estimated model, we calculate theoretically derived indices of government accountability and capture. Moreover, we derive indices that measure the relative importance of different policy- and non-policy-oriented voting motives for a number of socioeconomic groups. Further, we evaluate the relationship between the relative importance of different voting motives and government performance (i.e., accountability and capture).