Three essays on politics in Kenya

This dissertation examines ethnic patronage, local conflict, and election fraud in Kenya in three separate essays. Fraud, violence, and ethnicity are difficult to measure, and they often play a central role in narratives and theories about African politics. The essays in this dissertation draw on natural language processing, spatial statistics, and demography to improve measurement of these concepts and, in turn, our understanding of how they function in Kenya. The approaches developed here can be generalized to conflict, ethnicity, and fraud in other contexts.