Abstract
On 12 October 1974 Kenya held her second ‘semi-competitive’ elections to the National Assembly within the framework of a one-party state. The elections marked the seventh time Kenyans had chosen representatives for a national legislature since the British colonial government initiated the process in 1957 to commence the transition of the country to independent rule. Though the elections of 1974. produced no significant changes in either the composition of Kenya’s governing elite or government policy, the exercise was of considerable significance in terms of the evolution and routinisation of the procedural and structural mechanisms employed by President Jomo Kenyatta and his government to maintain their authority vis-à-vis the Kenyan public, particularly in rural areas.
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Notes
Hyden and Leys, ‘Elections and Politics in Single Party Systems: The Case of Kenya and Tanzania’, British journal of Political Science, ii, no. 4 (Oct 1972) 389–420.
S. P. Huntington, ‘Political Order and Political Decay’, in his Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) pp. 1–92.
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Cherry Gertzel, The Politics of Independent Kenya (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970) pp. 74–124.
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Aristide R. Zolberg, Creating Political Order (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966).
Fred Hayward, ‘A Reassessment of Conventional Wisdom About the Informed Public: National Political Information in Ghana’, American Political Science Review, lxx, no. 2 (June 1976) 433–451.
Joel D. Barkan, ‘Further Reassessment of the Conventional Wisdom: Political Knowledge and Voting Behavior in Rural Kenya’, American Political Science Review, lxx, no. 2 (June 1976) 452–5.
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© 1978 Joel D. Barkan and John J. Okumu
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Barkan, J.D., Okumu, J.J. (1978). ‘Semi-Competitive’ Elections, Clientelism, and Political Recruitment in a No-Party State: The Kenyan Experience. In: Hermet, G., Rose, R., Rouquié, A. (eds) Elections Without Choice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03342-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03342-3_5
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