Degree Name
Master of Arts
Graduate Program
Political Science
Advisor
Bloom, Stephen R.
Abstract
Hale's (2008) relational theory posits that when less politically relevant ethnic groups experience marginalization and exploitation from the dominant ethnic groups, it creates an orientation in which these groups trust only their co-ethnics in distributing patronage and public goods. To what extent do variations in institutional trust among ethnic groups influence co-ethnic voting behavior? I argue that levels of trust in the president can be understood as one of the conditions under which voters use ethnic identity to decide their vote choice. When trust in a co-ethnic candidate is high, members of an ethnic group will prefer to vote along ethnic lines. This is because groups perceive it as a mechanism of reducing the uncertainties attached to the non-co-ethnic candidate since their main concern is interest maximization. Thus, higher levels of trust in the president should be associated with higher ethnic voting. Using the 2010 urban survey data in Nigeria, my hypothesis test result confirms the proposed theory. The contribution to the body of work on ethnic voting from the confirmed theory is that levels of trust in the institution of the president can be categorized as one of the instrumentalist drivers of ethnic voting, as the Nigeria case revealed.