The politics of mayoral reselection under centralized candidate nominations in South Africa

Incumbent local politicians often face high rates of turnover in many new democracies. While studies on the renomination of local incumbents in advanced democracies focus on the voter-level origins of turnover, renomination in parties where candidate selection is centralized is less well understood. I argue that national party elites use the political scarcity generated by the high turnover of local incumbents to send a credible signal to their ethnic group by bolstering the presence of their co-ethnics in local offices. I test my argument using an original dataset of incumbent mayors in South Africa’s African National Congress party in four local government elections. I find that mayors who are co-ethnics with the president are more likely to be reselected. This finding shows that accountability to citizens is less central to parties that use centralized nomination procedures and that parties use non-merit-based criteria to evaluate politicians.