Rural Bias in African Electoral Systems: Unequal Representation in Single Member District Elections 1 Catherine Boone Professor of Government and International Development London School of Economics and Political Science c.boone@lse.ac.uk Michael Wahman Swedish Research Council Fellow London School of Economics and Political Science m.wahman@lse.ac.uk Abstract Although the problem of electoral malapportionment is a recurrent theme in external monitoring missions' reports on African elections, few academic researchers have tackled this issue. In this paper we theorize the meaning and broader implications of malapportionment in eight African countries with Single Member District (SMD) electoral systems. Using a new dataset on registered voters and constituency level election results, we study malapportionment's magnitude, persistence over time, and some of its electoral consequences. The analysis reveals that patterns of apportionment institutionalized in the pre-1990 era established a long-lasting bias in favor of rural voters. This "rural bias" has been strikingly stable in the post-1990 era, even in cases where the ancien regime has been voted out of power. These findings challenge conventional wisdoms about urban bias and urban-rural dynamics in Africa, and suggest new research agendas for African electoral studies. Keywords: elections, malapportionment, Africa, rural, urban bias, democracy, multipartism 1 We thank Joe Amick and Josiah Marineau, graduate students in the Dept. of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and Daniel Chapman, a UT undergraduate, for assistance in gathering and preparing data for this paper. Funds from the University of Texas Long Chair in Democratic Studies financed some of the work. Wahman is thankful for financial support from the Swedish Research Council (Dnr 2012-6653). We thank Jørgen Elklit and John Ishiyama for providing some electoral data and Matthijs Bogaards, Jeffrey Conroy-Krutz, Jørgen Elklit, Amy Poteete, Milan Svolik, and Dwayne Woods for valuable comments. Earlier versions were presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association on 31 August 2013 and the 2013 General Conference of the European Consortium of Political Research, on 7 September 2013.