UCLA

Why do voters tolerate poorly performing politicians? In African contexts, existing theory highlights lack of information, ethnic voting, and clientelistic equilibriums as potential explanations. Another explanation has remained overlooked: accountability is impaired by internalized racism, a psychological phenomenon wherein members of disadvantaged racial groups implicitly or explicitly adopt racist attitudes, ideologies, and behaviors instilled and perpetuated by dominant racial power structures. Notwithstanding its centrality in much African scholarship, political scientists have not investigated internalized racism as an explanation for impaired accountability, in large part because social scientists lack appropriate methodological tools to systematically document internalized racism and its effects.

My research addresses this gap. In this dissertation, I outline internalized racism’s character, origins, and relevance in African contexts. I then leverage data from an original survey among 600 Kenyan respondents toward two ends. First, I use survey data to develop and validate new explicit measures of internalized racism. Second, I use survey data to test three hypotheses regarding internalized racism’s impact on contemporary political attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors: (1) internalized racism alters political evaluations via motivated reasoning, (2) internalized racism increases perceptions and expectations of ethnic discrimination, and (3) internalized racism alters patterns of political participation. While the survey included an embedded experiment with a new intervention to reduce internalized racism, this initial attempt at causal identification did not prove successful. I therefore turn to observational analyses to test the three research hypotheses. I do not find compelling evidence that internalized racism affects political evaluations via racial motivated reasoning. However, I do find that internalized racism significantly predicts reported experiences of ethnic discrimination. Contrary to expectations, I do not find evidence that internalized racism depresses political efficacy or adversarial participation. However, I find evidence that internalized racism significantly predicts acceptance of clientelistic norms. The findings raising the possibility that internalized racism increases tendencies toward ethnic voting and drives persistent clientelism, thus impairing accountability and producing a self-fulfilling prophecy of poor-quality governance. This research adds depth to existing political science theory by shifting emphasis to racial identities in a context where scholars have deemphasized race in recent decades.