Canvassing is an important way in which political parties around the world raise awareness and connect with voters. Despite this, the literature on parties in new democracies, and Africa in particular, has tended to overlook this form of activity, focusing instead on vote buying, mass rallies, and meetings. In this paper, we use public opinion survey data from Afrobarometer and the Comparative National Elections Project to show that overall rates of canvassing in Africa are similar to other new, as well as many established, democracies. The data also challenge several dominant views of party campaigns in the Africanist literature. First, African parties do not concentrate primarily on turning out their base, rather than reaching across the partisan divide. Indeed, the opposite is the case. African parties expend more energy contacting nonpartisan independents and cross-partisans, and thus make a potentially meaningful contribution to the supply of multiparty competition. Second, the vast majority of contacts occur without any clientelist exchanges of material goods between parties and individual voters. And third, while incumbent parties enjoy canvassing advantages over opposition parties in around one-third of the surveyed countries, opposition parties (viewed collectively) match the party in power in terms of the ground game in another third, and enjoy higher rates of contact in yet another third.
At the country level, we find that people are more likely to be contacted in societies with higher rates of grassroots party structures. While parties are more likely to canvass citizens who live in neighbourhoods with good roads, they also contact at higher rates in rural, less developed, and more violent and less secure neighbourhoods. Within these neighbourhoods, parties are likely to contact citizens who are more visible in terms of their participation in community-level politics.
Finally, while parties contact people who are already more likely to vote, we show that contact increases the odds of voting even further, by around one-third.
