Electoral participation and democratization in Zambia: do poverty levels affect voters' perspectives?

Abstract

By concentrating on electoral participation and poverty levels across provinces, this paper provides an explanation to the fluctuating people attachment to party politics. In particular, since poverty levels were different among rural and urban provinces and governments have displayed different sensibilities towards urban and rural constituencies the paper tries to discover whether such differences do count for political participation. In the 00s, after the formation of the Patriotic Front (PF), a growing interest has been placed on inequalities and on the fight against poverty in electoral programmes of both governing party and the oppositions. However, the results have been ambiguous in terms of participation. Our findings is that participation was rather driven by other factors such as tradeunionism in Copperbelt and ethnicity in the Southern province.