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Does Participation Reinforce Patronage? Policy Preferences, Turnout and Class in Urban Ghana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2016

Noah L. Nathan
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Abstract

Political competition is expected to become less particularistic as prosperity rises and a middle class emerges. But particularistic linkages persist despite rising wealth in urban Ghana. Politicians are unable to commit to campaign promises with voters who want large-scale public policies, many of whom are in the middle class. This creates incentives to avoid mobilizing many of these voters and to ignore their preferences. As a result, voters who want major public policies rather than patronage differentially refrain from participation, allowing poorer voters to dominate the electorate and party organizations. This may only reinforce politicians’ disincentives to make policy appeals, and stall the emergence of more policy-based electoral competition even as the middle class grows.

Keywords

African politicspolitical participationparty–voter linkagesclientelismAfrican middle class
Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 229 - 255
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, University of Michigan (email: nlnathan@umich.edu). Adam Auerbach, Lorena Barberia, Robert Bates, Julie Faller, Shelby Grossman, Mai Hassan, Evelyne Huber, Nahomi Ichino, Steven Levitsky, Jeffrey Paller, Robert Schub, Ariel White, three anonymous reviewers, and participants at the 2015 MPSA and APSA meetings provided helpful comments. Thanks to Dr. Franklin Oduro, Adu Kakra Duayeden and the Ghana Center for Democratic Development for making the fieldwork possible, to Jonathan Phillips, and to Dr. Philomena Nyarko and the Ghana Statistical Service. Primary research assistance was provided by Alhassan Ibn Abdallah, Francis Addo, Mahmuda Ainoo and Maame Gyesiwa Sam. Funding was provided by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship DGE 1144152, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. Online appendices are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123416000351. Replication materials will be available from April 2017 in order to allow for completion of a companion project at http://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS.

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