“To run is not to reach your destination.” This Swahili proverb serves as the opening of Keith Weghorst’s new book on opposition candidacy in electoral autocracies. It is a pithy summary of the work as a whole, capturing not only the core theme of the argument but also the cultural and political environment of the study itself. The environment consists of electoral autocracies in general and Tanzania in particular, a setting that inspires a puzzling observation that Weghorst makes early on in the book: electoral authoritarian regimes feature more opposition candidates than democracies do, despite the fact that members of opposition parties face greater threats to running and higher chances of losing. Over the course of eleven meticulous chapters, Weghorst provides a compelling answer to this puzzle—one rooted in the life histories of candidates for office and how these individual experiences shape both the decision to even run for office in the first place, as well as the perceived payoffs of public service.
One of Weghorst’s key insights is that “the real kernel of candidacy lies in initial decisions to become involved in politics in the first place” (p. 17). In other words, we need to turn back the clock and consider the years and decades leading up to the decision to run for office to fully appreciate how politicians choose to navigate the political world. Weghorst argues that by considering these life trajectories holistically, we gain deeper understanding of the path-dependent processes that can critically shape both public and private routes to public office. He identifies two specific paths that help explain nomination outcomes in electoral autocracies: civic activism and careers in civil society organizations and non-governmental organizations are more likely to forge pathways to opposition candidacy, while career partisanship tends to lead to ruling-party candidacy.
One of the most intriguing implications of the argument is how the lifetime experiences of individuals can condition the payoffs (or costs) of running for office in profoundly different ways for opposition and ruling party members, respectively. For example, among opposition candidates, experience with civic activism teaches them that there can be benefits in losing elections, which increase the willingness of such candidates to bear the risks of running for office in authoritarian regimes. Weghorst stresses that such candidates are no less rational than the ruling party members who run to win; rather, because rationality is inherently subjective, the potential benefits of running for office may be about more than just material gains.
To test his claims, Weghorst uses a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to illuminate how experiences with civic activism early in life translate into opposition candidacy down the line. One of Weghorst’s most innovative analytical approaches is using sequence analysis on life history calendars to document various pathways to candidacy. Sequence analysis considers the entirety of a respondent’s or case’s related events/states together as a single observation (a sequence). This approach enables us to consider trajectories holistically—comparing the entire careers of individuals side by side. Weghorst is among the first to deploy this methodology in a political science framework and the potential extensions to other fields of inquiry abound: it could easily be applied to the study of personnel in bureaucracies, government ministries, judiciaries, militaries, and so on. Any scholar interested in unpacking the lifetime trajectories of government personnel—and the interactions between institutional structure and political behavior—could benefit from using this analytical approach.
While the life history calendar is one of the most intriguing analytical contributions of the book, one potential caveat of the method is that information is self-reported. Specifically, data on career trajectories is collected using grid-form questionnaires that track events and activities over time. In this case, respondents were asked to document significant early moments in their political careers (e.g., the first time they organized a local grassroots community meeting or the first time they became an official member of a political party). Because life history calendars are compiled retrospectively by the individual under study, one might be concerned about selective memory and social desirability biases—concerns that Weghorst is up front about (though how an individual remembers their own history may be telling, too). Nonetheless, Weghorst is able to address some of these concerns by triangulating across many sources on the political careers of his research subjects, which enables a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches. These additions are key to the development of the book as a whole: the rich qualitative case narratives woven throughout the text not only flesh out causal mechanisms but also humanize the life narratives that are at the heart of this analysis. This book will undoubtedly serve as a template for students and practitioners of mixed-methods research.
The empirical innovations of this book are manifold: it is the first to comprehensively document the candidate decision-making process for national legislatures in Africa; it is also among the first political science works to use the life history calendar method (and the first to do so in the African context). The data from Tanzania in particular are rich and expansive, including archival research, in-depth interviews with political elites, an original database of the CVs of more than 700 politicians, and original survey data from the legislature. The survey deserves special mention for its comprehensiveness, including responses from winning candidates, losing candidates, unsuccessful nomination seekers, and prospective candidates. Collecting information on losing, successful, and even prospective candidates is a critical part of his analytical strategy and offers convincing demonstration of his theory on different pathways to nomination, particularly those paths not taken.
Political scientists tend to take history into account by looking at path dependencies on a macro level—the broad, expansive structures and forces that condition a variety of institutional outcomes. But this book reconsiders path dependency on a micro level—the personal, intimate choices and opportunities that can critically determine individual trajectories. Indeed, Weghorst’s treatment of path dependency—both conceptually and empirically—stands out as one of his key intellectual contributions and is what makes this book important reading for any scholar of political institutions and history. It deserves a broad readership.
