No abstract

Across sub-Saharan Africa agricultural subsidy programs have again become a common strategy for combatting rural poverty, increasing agricultural production, and reducing food insecurity. Despite a large literature examining subsidies' effects on output and welfare, little is known about their political effects. This paper examines Malawi's Agricultural Input Subsidy Programme, one of the largest and most expensive programs implemented, which was launched by the government in 2005. We examine whether the incumbent party, the Democratic Progressive Party headed by president Bingu wa Mutharika, benefited from Malawi's subsidy program by examining a longitudinal dataset of 1,846 rural Malawians interviewed in 2008 and again in 2010. The individual-level data show no evidence that the subsidy program was targeted to Mutharika's co-ethnics or co-partisans. Our analysis further demonstrates that the subsidy program increased support for the incumbent party. These results suggest that even when parties are unable or unwilling to target distributional programs at the local level, they may nonetheless derive political benefits. As anti-poverty programs - including agricultural subsidies to small-scale farmers - become increasingly common across the continent, our results suggest that they may help to explain patterns of party affiliation and vote choice, particularly where traditional patterns of partisan affiliation related to ethnic or regional identities weaken.

In this article, we study protest participants in the May 2006 immigration rights marches in Los Angeles. Analysis of original survey data of 876 march participants yields five main results. First, despite substantial dispute among organizers on how to frame the marches, we find protest participants were similar across march locations organized by different coalitions. Second, we find Spanish-English bilingual participants seemed to benefit from being in two media environments, as they reported more information sources about the protest events than monolingual participants. Third, women reported hearing about the protest events from more information sources, and Spanish-English bilingual women reported hearing from more information sources than any other group, suggesting they acted as social connectors behind the massive participation. Fourth, we confirm the importance of Spanish-language radio as an information source, but our data also point to the significance of television and English-language radio. Finally, analyzing data of first-time protesters, we estimate the immigrant rights marches newly politicized 125,000 people in Los Angeles who spoke Spanish and not English.