Kikuyu was the largest ethnic group in Kenya, accounting for ** percent of the country's population in 2019. Native to Central Kenya, the Kikuyu constitute a Bantu group with more than eight million people. The groups Luhya and Kalenjin followed, with respective shares of **** percent and **** percent of the population. Overall, Kenya has more than 40 ethnic groups.

Ethnic group map illustrates the extent and distribution of the different ethnic groups within Kenya. Major towns are indicated on the map but no further topographic detail is included.

Who are Africa’s swing voters? This paper argues that in settings where ethnicity is politically salient, core and swing are defined by whether ethnic groups have a co-ethnic leader in the election. For groups with a co-ethnic in the race, there is typically less uncertainty about which party or candidate will best represent the group’s interests. For those without a co-ethnic in the race, uncertainty is often greater, making these voters potentially more receptive to campaign persuasion and more likely to change voting intentions during the campaign. Consistent with these expectations, panel data from Kenya’s 2013 presidential election shows that voters from groups without a co-ethnic in the race were more than two and a half times more likely to change their voting intentions during the campaign period.

These 28 tiff files represent 2015 population estimates. However, please note that many of the country-level files include 2020 population estimates including: Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, Cote d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Eritrea, Eswatini, The Gambia, Ghana, Lesotho, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Sao Tome & Principe, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Togo, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. South Sudan, Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia are intentionally omitted from this dataset. However, a country-level dataset for Ethiopia can be found at https://data.humdata.org/dataset/ethiopia-high-resolution-population-density-maps-demographic-estimates.

This dissertation examines ethnic patronage, local conflict, and election fraud in Kenya in three separate essays. Fraud, violence, and ethnicity are difficult to measure, and they often play a central role in narratives and theories about African politics. The essays in this dissertation draw on natural language processing, spatial statistics, and demography to improve measurement of these concepts and, in turn, our understanding of how they function in Kenya. The approaches developed here can be generalized to conflict, ethnicity, and fraud in other contexts. The first essay presents a method for extracting ethnic information from names. Existing methods give biased estimates by ignoring uncertainty in the mapping between names and ethnicity. I apply my improved, approximately unbiased method to data on political appointments from 1963 to 2010 in Kenya, and find that existing narratives about distributive politics do not accord with empirical patterns. The second essay examines patterns of violent ethnic targeting during Kenya's 2007-2008 post-election violence. I focus on patterns of arson, one of the key types of violence used in the Rift Valley. I find that incidence of arson is related to the presence of ethnic outsiders, and even more strongly related to measures of land quality, accessibility, and electoral competition. Using a difference-in-differences design, I show that arson caused a significant decrease in the number of Kikuyu and other immigrant ethnic groups registered to vote; no such decline is observed in indigenous ethnic groups. The third essay documents the prevalence of dead voters on Kenya's voter register prior to the contentious 2007 presidential elections, and shows how dead registered voters may have facilitated electoral fraud. Simply accounting for the number of dead voters demonstrates that turnout was greater than 100% in several opposition constituencies, and implausibly high in most of the incumbent president's home province. Ecological inference suggests that ballot-s tuffing occurred in candidate strongholds, rather than competitive constituencies. These results are consistent with the opposition party's allegations of fraud.

Christianity is the main religion adopted in Kenya. As of 2019, over ** percent of the population identified as Christians, among which **** percent were Protestants, **** percent Catholics, **** percent Evangelicals, and ***** percent from African Instituted Churches. Furthermore, nearly ** percent of Kenyans were Muslim.