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Abstract Many African legislatures experience high rates of electoral turnover. But who gets re-elected and why? In this article, we employ a Bourdieuan framework to explore how different endowments of legislators with various forms of capital (economic, social, cultural, and symbolic) affect electoral success in Uganda. Using an original dataset with biographical, attitudinal, relational, and performance-related information on Members of the 10th Ugandan Parliament (2016–2021), we model incumbents’ we find that re-election is consistently associated with legislators’ embeddedness in intra-parliamentary discussion networks and access to party funding. Parliamentary speech-making is positively related to re-election, but the association is not robust once other forms of capital are jointly considered; speech activity matters most among more highly embedded MPs. By contrast, our measure of constituency service seems unrelated to incumbent success. Our findings suggest that non-clientelist strategies play a stronger role for legislative success than currently acknowledged in the literature.
Osei et al. (Fri,) studied this question.