Less Accountable: Internalized Racism’s Impact on Kenyan Political Evaluations

• In Event: Democracy and Identity Politics

Abstract

Why do citizens tolerate poorly performing politicians? In African contexts, existing theory highlights insufficient information and instrumental ethnic voting as potential explanations for imperfect accountability. Taking a new approach, I posit that internalized racism systematically undermines political accountability in African countries. Internalized racism is an individual-level psychological phenomenon wherein non-White individuals implicitly or explicitly adopt racist attitudes, ideologies, and behaviors perpetuated by dominant White power structures. In African contexts, racist colonizing ideologies encouraged citizens to see themselves as incapable political actors, thereby reducing resistance to colonial rule. I argue that these ideologies persist and alter political attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors among contemporary African citizens. I investigate three hypotheses based on specific components of colonizing ideologies. First, colonizing ideologies painted Africans as incapable of providing effective governance. I therefore hypothesize that internalized racism biases African citizens toward worse perceptions of government performance via motivated reasoning (H1). Second, colonizing myths depicted Africans as uniquely prone to ethnic (i.e., “tribal”) conflict. I therefore hypothesize that internalized racism increases African citizens' perceptions of ethnic discrimination (H2). To test these hypotheses, I conduct a survey experiment among 600 Kenyan respondents. This survey validates and applies a new intervention to reduce internalized racism in the short term, allowing causal identification of internalized racism’s effects on citizens’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. If internalized racism alters perceptions of government performance and ethnic discrimination, these dynamics matter because they undermine officials’ incentives to deliver good governance. Biased evaluations diminish rewards for good performance, and ethnic considerations crowd out performance-based considerations in voting decisions. Thus, racial ideologies create a self-fulfilling prophecy of poor performance. This research highlights how racial hierarchies constitute a continuing impediment to democracy functioning.

Author

• Jennifer A. Hamilton, Georgia Institute of Technology