Ameze Belo-Osagie

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2022 - 2023 Academic Year

Nigeria Decides: Campaign Strategy in the 2023 Election

Formal models of electoral violence predict that political parties should target swing voters because they are the most expensive to buy off. If multiple parties are bidding for the support of swing voters, it is cheaper to simply prevent them from voting altogether (Robinson & Torvik, 2009; Collier & Vicente, 2012). However, empirical evidence suggests that electoral violence tends to be targeted toward core supporters of the non-incumbent party (Bratton, 2008; Gutierrez-Romero, 2014). To resolve the mismatch between theory and empirics, this project focuses on the strategic logic underlying electoral violence and on the mechanics of how violence is employed. First, I hypothesize that deploying electoral violence introduces principal-agent problems that are best resolved by deputizing the police. For this reason, electoral violence is most effectively employed by local incumbents. Second, I hypothesize that parties have weak information about the preferences of swing voters and are incentivized by electoral rules to build a geographically dispersed support base. As a result, parties are less likely to target swing voters and more likely to target core opposition supporters. This project will test these hypotheses with evidence from Nigeria’s 2023 Presidential Election using ethnographic interviews, surveys, and a survey experiment.

Ameze “Mez” Belo-Osagie, Department of Political Science

Ameze “Mez” Belo-Osagie is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, EDGE Fellow, and PhD student in political science at Stanford. Her research focuses on political violence; state capacity; and state-citizen interaction, particularly through the electoral, carceral, and welfare systems. She holds a BA, cum laude, in political science and African studies from Yale, where she received the James Gordon Bennet Prize. She also holds a JD from Harvard Law School, where she served as Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review, won the 2021 Ames Moot Court Competition as part of the Lloyd Gaines Memorial Team, and received the Pro Bono distinction for completing over 1000 hours of pro bono legal work. Previously, Belo-Osagie has worked as a research assistant at a counterinsurgency-focused think tank, as a program assistant at a legal aid clinic focused on torture in Nigerian prisons, and as a student-attorney representing criminal defendants in Boston courts.

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