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This dissertation examines ethnic patronage, local conflict, and election fraud in Kenya in three separate essays. Fraud, violence, and ethnicity are difficult to measure, and they often play a central role in narratives and theories about African politics. The essays in this dissertation draw on natural language processing, spatial statistics, and demography to improve measurement of these concepts and, in turn, our understanding of how they function in Kenya. The approaches developed here can be generalized to conflict, ethnicity, and fraud in other contexts. The first essay presents a method for extracting ethnic information from names. Existing methods give biased estimates by ignoring uncertainly in the mapping between names and ethnicity. I apply my improved, approximately unbiased method to data on political appointments from 1963 to 2010 in Kenya, and find that existing narratives about distributive politics do not accord with empirical patterns. The second essay examines patterns of violent ethnic targeting during Kenya's 2007-2008 post-election violence. I focus on patterns of arson, one of the key types of violence used in the Rift Valley. I find that incidence of arson is related to the presence of ethnic outsiders, and even more strongly related to measures of land quality, accessibility, and electoral competition. Using a difference-in-differences design, I show that arson caused a significant decrease in the number of Kikuyu and other immigrant ethnic groups registered to vote; no such decline is observed in indigenous ethnic groups. The third essay documents the prevalence of dead voters on Kenya's voter register prior to the contentious 2007 presidential elections, and shows how dead registered voters may have facilitated electoral fraud. Simply accounting for the number of dead voters demonstrates that turnout was greater than 100% in several opposition constituencies, and implausibly high in most of the incumbent president's home province. Ecological inference suggests that ballot-stuffing occurred in candidate strongholds, rather than competitive constituencies. These results are consistent with the opposition party's allegations of fraud. / Government

La légitimité du processus électoral est souvent remise en question par des candidats et membres de l’élite politique qui tente de justifier leurs défaites aux urnes. Par conséquent, plusieurs électeurs sont exposés à des allégations non-fondées de fraude électorale, et ce, même si la fraude électorale se produit très rarement dans les démocraties établies. Certaines études ont déjà déterminé que des affirmations trompeuses concernant l’intégrité des élections ont des effets négatifs sur la perception des citoyens face à l’impartialité électorale. En effet, des chercheurs ont montré que les allégations non-fondées de fraude électorale ébranlent la confiance que les électeurs ont envers le système électoral. Cependant, aucune étude n’a exploré l’effet potentiel de ces allégations sur la participation électorale. En utilisant des données de sondage originales collectées au Royaume-Uni, ce projet considère l’impact des affirmations de fraude électorale sur la décision d’aller voter ou non. En premier lieu, nous regardons l’effet sur les dispositions électorales spécifiques, c’est-à-dire la probabilité qu’un individu ira voter. Par la suite, nous testons la capacité de messages correctifs à rectifier les perceptions erronées des électeurs et limiter l’impact négatif des allégations de fraude électorale. Les résultats de l’expérience démontrent que l’exposition à des allégations non-fondées de fraude électoral n’a pas d’effet sur la participation des citoyens aux urnes. Cependant, des analyses supplémentaires permettent d’identifier une relation entre les perceptions de fraude et la décision d’aller voter. Considérant ces résultats, des explications alternatives sont présentées. / The legitimacy of the electoral process is often put into question by political candidates and elites who seek to account for their loss. As a result, a significant portion of voters are presented with unfounded allegations of widespread election fraud even though such fraud seldom occurs in consolidated democracies. Previous research has determined that misleading claims regarding the integrity of elections carry important implications for citizens’ perceptions of electoral fairness. In fact, scholars have shown unsubstantiated claims of election fraud to be detrimental to voters’ confidence in elections as well as their support for key democratic norms. However, the literature has yet to systematically explore the impact of electoral fraud allegations on voter participation. Using original survey data from the United Kingdom, this research measures the impact of unfounded allegations of election fraud on the decision to vote or not. We first look at the impact on specific dispositions of voting, that is, the likelihood that an individual will turn out at the next election. Then, we examine the ability of corrective messages to rectify misperceptions of electoral integrity and limit the negative impacts of fraud allegations on voter participation. The results of the survey experiment do not support the hypotheses according to which exposure to unfounded allegations of fraud influences confidence in elections and voter participation. However, results from supplementary analyses highlight an important relation between perceptions of fraud and subsequent desire to cast a ballot. Explanations for these findings are discussed.