Browsing by Author "Hamer, Sam"

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    Championing the poor: Branding around poverty reduction as a response to electoral competition in Malawi, 2005-2014
    (2016-01) Hamer, Sam
    Malawian national politics since 2005 has featured two presidents, Bingu wa Mutharika and Joyce Banda, who quit their respective former parties when political rivals impeded their paths to power. Both leaders thereafter established new political parties and opted to “brand” them as prioritising poverty reduction. These brands—which had programmatic, rhetorical, and symbolic components—allowed Mutharika and Banda the possibility of achieving a broader national appeal, whereas presidential elections before 2009 had been decided on the basis of regional patronage networks. Mutharika’s brand suggested how he would empower smallholder farmers to be able to ensure their own food security. Mutharika achieved this outcome in his first term and the voters overwhelmingly returned him to office. A collapsing economy in his second term, however, intensified national poverty. Banda’s brand was a response to this poverty and suggested how she would be committed to alleviating poverty for Malawi’s marginalised groups including women. Her “handout” programmes endeared her to some poor Malawians who had not benefitted from Mutharika-era growth. The 2014 election result, in which 36 percent of the vote was enough to win the presidency, indicates how no candidate’s political brand had earned the appeal of a majority of voters. Analysis of Afrobarometer survey data reveals that Malawi’s citizens tend to prefer government action to address food shortages over the redress of poverty directly. Mutharika’s successful efforts to combat food insecurity were relatively salient to voters in 2009. Banda’s destitution-centred efforts were less successful in the 2014 election.
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    “Our Father’s Programmes”: Political branding around social protection in Botswana, 2008-2014
    (2016-01) Hamer, Sam
    The Botswana Democratic Party has ruled uninterrupted in Botswana since independence, but opposition parties have made significant inroads during recent elections. In the midst of this heightened political competition, President Ian Khama (2008- ) has sought to increase support for the party by remarketing the country’s employment-based programmes to serve new governmental objectives around employment and poverty reduction. Khama’s rebranding of public employment programmes (PEPs), especially the Ipelegeng Programme, has allowed government to target underserved beneficiary groups such as the urban poor, and provided more reliable incomes to out-of-work Batswana in rural areas. Critically, the rebranding of social protection programmes has resulted in their being publicly associated more with Khama himself than with government. Public displays of empathy for the conditions of the poor moreover, as manifested during Khama’s visits to disadvantaged areas, reinforced the president’s image as a poverty-sensitive leader. These programmatic and non-programmatic measures have together defined Khama’s social protection ‘brand’; or the public emphasis that the president has placed on his social protection agenda. For their part, opposition leaders have branded themselves around a “social-democratic” approach to poverty reduction. Since the 1990s, ruling and opposition parties have converged in their social protection ideologies as the BDP has “counterbranded” in response to electoral competition by adopting opposition policy ideas. Khama’s branding around personalised PEPs, in conclusion, generated strong support for himself among the rural poor especially owing to popular preferences for low-wage work over cash transfers. Using Afrobarometer survey data, this paper shows that Khama’s branding was insufficient to maintain the BDP vote, as the party’s poor performance in the 2014 election confirmed.