The role of ethnicity in electoral politics has been central to the study of sub-Saharan African politics for decades. A large literature on both elite incentives for ethnic mobilization and the distributional consequences of ethnically defined patronage networks has resulted from this central focus. Such scholarship typically takes the fact of ethnic voting for granted and focuses on explaining the logic of capitalizing on ethnic differences for political gain. In Beyond Ethnic Politics in Africa, Dominika Koter asks a different, and arguably more important, question: Why is electoral competition not ethnic in some African countries? Her answer to this question, which constitutes the central argument of the book, is that preexisting social structures in some contexts allow political candidates and parties to mobilize support without resorting to ethnic appeals. In particular, she argues that the presence of strong and influential community leaders results in less ethnic voting because such leaders serve as intermediaries between voters and candidates. Where they exist, these intermediaries—referred to as “vote carriers” in Senegal (p. 98)—are able to mobilize electoral support without regard for ethnicity, resulting in multiethnic bases of support for national political candidates.

In the theoretical chapter of the book, Koter makes three main claims. First, she argues that political candidates who are engaged in political clientelism can choose one of two mobilization strategies: appealing directly to coethnic voters or working with local traditional authorities, including chiefs, aristocrats, or religious leaders who command loyalty from a group of followers. Second, she argues that politicians always prefer to work with credible intermediaries if they are present: This is because strong local leaders are able to deliver votes from multiple ethnic communities, expanding a politician’s base of support. However, this indirect mobilization via intermediaries comes at a cost, as local leaders demand material resources for themselves and their followers in exchange for their support. Third, Koter argues that the presence and strength of local traditional leaders vary widely across Africa, and that such variation is exogenous to mass electoral mobilization. In particular, she points to precolonial differences in the degree to which politics was hierarchical, as well as to colonial efforts to reduce the power of such leaders in some parts of Africa, as the origins of differences in social structure across the continent—both of which preceded mass electoral politics.

Empirical support for these claims comes primarily from a structured and historically grounded comparison of Benin, in which voting follows an ethnic pattern, and Senegal, in which it does not. Koter draws on her deep knowledge of the secondary and historical literature on politics in each of these countries, as well as original interviews with political actors over the course of 11 months of fieldwork. She also draws on disaggregated electoral data and national public opinion data. The paired comparison on Benin and Senegal rules out, by design, many alternative explanations for the observed differences in the centrality of ethnicity for political outcomes. In particular, the author argues that ethnicity is socially salient in both countries, the relative sizes of ethnic groups are similar, and both countries have the same electoral rules.

In the first of two main empirical chapters, Koter carefully documents and traces the origins of differences in the strength of local leaders in Benin and Senegal. For Senegal, she draws on secondary literature to demonstrate the strength and influence of marabouts—religious clerics from the Sufi brotherhood—and traditional, caste-based elites. The local influence of marabouts is derived from their religious authority and their control over the distribution of material resources, including land. Similarly, caste-based aristocrats exert considerable influence via their control over land and their feudal relationships with lower-status members of their ethnic groups. Koter identifies the origins of these hierarchical social structures in precolonial political organizations and their interaction with French colonial administration. She then documents the absence of such local leaders in Benin. While Benin historically had similar caste-based hierarchies, she argues, the French colonial state dismantled them in response to anticolonial mobilization. As evidence that such stark differences in the strength of local leaders have persisted, she relies on contemporary public opinion data showing much lower levels of reliance on traditional and religious leaders in Benin compared to Senegal.

In the second main empirical chapter, Koter links these differences in social structure to electoral outcomes. This chapter presents the core empirical contribution of the book, and makes use of the author’s extensive field research and elite interviews. In this chapter, she illustrates the centrality of ethnicity in Beninese mobilization strategies, and the striking lack of reliance on electoral intermediaries. She does this by focusing on the content of campaign messages, which she describes as full of “language of intense regionalism and ethnic exclusiveness” (p. 84), the geographic foci of campaigns, explicit discussions with national politicians about their reliance on ethnicity for electoral mobilization, and regional and ethnic patterns in vote choice. In the second half of the chapter, she similarly draws on interview data to demonstrate the degree to which Senegalese political candidates depend on local power brokers, especially religious leaders, to deliver the vote. In contrast to Benin, ethnicity is uncorrelated with voting patterns, which Koter attributes to this reliance on local leaders. In a nice example of “exceptions proving the rule,” she uses within-country variation to show that the logic holds beyond the national-level comparison. In particular, Beninese politicians do use intermediaries in the North, where traditional authorities are stronger, and Senegalese politicians make ethnic appeals in the Casamance region, which lacks strong local leaders who could serve as intermediaries.

The final two empirical chapters provide additional, although somewhat weaker, empirical evidence for the book’s central claim. One chapter presents evidence that local leaders are weaker in the urban areas than they are in the rural areas of Senegal, and that incumbent support is lower in Dakar than in rural Senegal. Koter interprets this as evidence that local and traditional authorities mobilize electoral support, on the assumption that intermediaries prefer to deliver support for the incumbent. But we are not told whether or how this influences the role of ethnicity in attracting votes. In another chapter, she presents two brief case-based comparisons (Guinea vs. Mali and Botswana vs. Kenya) and cross-national correlations between survey measures of trust in local leaders and indicators of ethnic politics. While these additional pieces of empirical evidence provide some demonstration of generalizability, they do not have the same rigor or depth as the main comparison between Benin and Senegal.

On the whole, Beyond Ethnic Politics in Africa offers a clear, concise, and compelling account of the origins and implications of differences in the use of local intermediaries by political elites in Senegal and Benin. However, it is less clear that this account can indeed explain the presence or absence of ethnic politics more broadly. For the relative strength of local leaders to account for variation in the degree to which ethnicity predicts vote choice, it must be the case that local leaders are able to mobilize voters across ethnic lines. Koter provides persuasive evidence that intermediaries in Senegal are willing to mobilize support for non-coethnic politicians, but she does not tell us as much about the ethnic diversity of intermediaries’ followers. This omission is potentially consequential: If the voters mobilized by most local leaders are ethnically homogenous, we would observe strong ethnic patterns to voting, even if ethnic blocs often vote for non-coethnic candidates.

I suspect that the religious local leaders in Senegal do indeed command loyalty across ethnic lines, but in places where local traditional authorities are ethnically defined—as they are in much of Africa—the use of local leaders as electoral intermediaries would not reduce the degree to which ethnicity predicts vote choice. But this is ultimately an empirical question, and I have no doubt that this book will serve as an agenda-setting work for the future study of traditional leaders and ethnic politics in Africa.