Replication Data for: Drivers of Political Participation : The Role of Partisanship, Identity and Incentives in Mobilizing Zambian Citizens

Abstract

Scholars and policymakers widely view identity as a key driver of African citizens’ political engagement. In doing so, however, they have emphasized ethnicity and largely sidelined other identities, including gender, local origin, shared residency, and partisanship. In this paper, we explore which identities drive political engagement and why they do so. We employ an original survey experiment that includes various identities and other incentives that may drive citizens’ participation around Zambia’s 2021 national elections. We find that partisanship most influences individuals’ stated willingness to campaign for a candidate or meet with an MP, while ethnicity and social incentives play less significant roles. Finally, we explore the mechanisms underpinning these results and find that citizens anticipate sanctions if they fail to support a co-partisan but not a co-ethnic candidate. These findings have important implications for understanding political engagement and democratic development throughout the region.This dataset provides all the variables needed to replicate the results in the journal article "Drivers of Political Participation: The Role of Partisanship, Identity and Incentives in Mobilizing Zambian Citizens", published in Comparative Political Studies. The dataset contains variables from the Zambian Election Panel Study (ZEPS), including data from a survey experiment on ethnicity, partisanship and political participation around the 2021 general elections. The data was merged with data on party strongholds in the 2016 and 2021 general elections from the Electoral Commission in Zambia.