Mr President, voters want projects that impact their lives

President William Ruto inspects projects during his tour of Kajiado county. [Peterson Githaiga, Standard]

If President William Ruto is doing all these projects, why does he seem to be on the defensive vis-a-bus the decorate? The answer to this question requires a deep understanding of how voters think (and feel) about projects.

When all is said and done, the fact of the matter is that electoral competition creates incentives for politicians to launch as many projects as they can. This is for the simple reason that projects are readily visible and attributable. Any voter who sees a road being built can attach it to the effort of a particular politician. Of course sometimes voters can be wrong, but often they are right.

This dynamic can sometimes lead some politicians into thinking that what voters want are lots of projects everywhere.

However, that is not entirely accurate. Voters view projects as signs of effort. From their perspective, politicians are like workers who perform multiple complicated tasks that pertain to running the country. It is cognitively taxing and practically impossible to keep track of all these tasks. Therefore, voters rely on the simple heuristic of what they can see. Furthermore, it does not help that Kenya’s political culture is such that politicians cannot be trusted to deliver on big programmatic policies.

If preference for projects is merely a yardstick for discerning effort, it follows that projects may not always win votes. This raises the bigger question of what it is that voters wants.

The simple answer is that voters want development. And for the most part, many have an idea of development as increasing modernization (more schooling, better healthcare, modern infrastructure, and the like). Some of these goals, of course, are achievable through projects.

Yet to satisfy voters in pursuit of any of them requires a lot more than just projects. Voters need to be inspired to feel like they are part of a mission of social transformation. They need to both believe in the cause and serve as active participants in its realisation. A straightforward implication of this claim is that it is hard to persuade people with projects alone. Typically, politicians require to invest in “recruitment” of the public to the cause. Otherwise, voters may end up not showing “gratitude” for projects by rewarding incumbent politicians.

Notice that this is a separate consideration than the usual (valid) claim that projects do not always generate broad-based growth; and therefore may not always have the desired electorate impacts. Above and beyond the material impact of projects, voters also need to feel like they are being taken seriously and are active participants in their own economic transformation.

All this to say that President Ruto’s approval ratings reflect not just the projects he had launched or completed, but also the perceptions of how those projects make voters feel (which also affects their perceived economic impacts of those projects). This is an important point. The politics of structural transformation is such that we must seek to recruit all Kenyans to the cause of structural transformation. With this in mind, Kenyans are not easily satisfied with having projects thrown at them. They want projects that have meaning in their lives

The writer is a professor at Georgetown University