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Primaries on Demand? Intra-Party Politics and Nominations in Ghana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2012

Abstract

In new democracies, why do political party leaders relinquish power over nominations and allow legislative candidates to be selected by primary elections? Where the legislature is weak and politics is clientelistic, democratization of candidate selection is driven by local party members seeking benefits from primary contestants. Analysis of an original dataset on legislative nominations and political interference by party leaders for the 2004 and 2008 elections in Ghana shows that primaries are more common where nominations attract more aspirants and where the party is more likely to win, counter to predictions in the existing literature. Moreover, the analysis shows that party leaders interfere in primaries in a pattern consistent with anticipation of party members’ reactions.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

Department of Government, Harvard University (email: nichino@gov.harvard.edu, nlnathan@fas.harvard.edu). The authors wish to thank Robert Bates, Jorge Domínguez, Jeff Frieden, Frances Hagopian, Adam Glynn, Torben Iversen, James Robinson, Arthur Spirling and seminar participants at Harvard University for helpful suggestions, and Abel Boreto, Sangu Delle, Daniel Kroop, Jitka Vinduskova and Sumorwuo Zaza for their research assistance. Support for this research was provided by the Committee on African Studies and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. To ensure exclusive access to our original data collection for a second article, we impose a one year embargo on making replication material for this article publicly available. Project data will be available no later than 12 months after publication of this article at http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/nichino.

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31 The number of constituencies was increased from 200 to 230 just prior to the 2004 elections.

32 Constituency development funds like those in Ghana exist in Kenya, India, the Philippines, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia, among others. See Philip Keefer and Stuti Khemani, ‘When Do Legislators Pass on “Pork”? The Determinants of Legislator Utilization of a Constituency Development Fund in India’ (The World Bank, Working Paper, 2009).

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39 Party supporters can become ‘card-carrying’ members by applying at a local branch office of the party and paying their annual dues, which are about US$1 (author's interview with NPP Regional Secretary, Brong Ahafo Region, Sunyani, 6 October 2009).

40 Article 11 of the Constitution of the New Patriotic Party, Accra, Ghana (1998).

41 Öhman, ‘The Heart and Soul of the Party’.

42 The former General Secretary (1998–2005) and current Vice-Chairman of the NDC said of his party's approach to candidate selection: ‘In 2000 we decided to go a bit more bureaucratic … and we paid for it because we lost a number of seats … So in 2004 we didn't make the mistake. We opened the flood gates so that everybody’ could run (Author's interview with former NDC General Secretary (1998–2005) and current Vice-Chairman, Accra, 6 May 2010. Also author's interview with NDC General Secretary, Accra, 5 March 2010). Although this decision suggests the adoption of primaries by the weaker party, in line with Serra, this view is not supported by our data analysis (Serra, ‘Why Primaries?’). Though the NDC had more primaries in 2004 than in 2000, the party leadership continued to prevent some primaries in both 2004 and 2008. The NPP was still more likely to hold primaries than the NDC in both 2004 and 2008.

43 Article 11 of the Constitution of the New Patriotic Party, Accra, Ghana (1998); Article 42 of the Constitution of the National Democratic Congress, Accra, Ghana (2002).

44 Generally, to be eligible for the primary in 2004 and 2008, aspirants had to be dues-paying members in the constituency, hold only Ghanaian citizenship, pay a filing fee, reported to be roughly US$350 in 2008, and also demonstrate support from party members in the constituency.

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51 For example, in the Effutu constituency in the NPP in 2004. See ‘Confusion Rocks Effutu NPP’, modernghana.com, 18 October 2004, http://www.modernghana.com/news/64919/1/confusion-rock-effutu-npp.html.

52 See Enoch Darfah Frimpong, ‘NPP Fomena Appeals to National Executive’, Daily Graphic, 14 March 2008.

53 See Samuel Kyei-Boateng, ‘Protest Over NDC Plan for Wenchi East’, Daily Graphic, 25 September 2004.

54 Our main sources were the AllAfrica.com database search engine, which contains articles from three Ghanaian daily newspapers (Ghanaian Chronicle, Accra Daily Mail, and Daily Searchlight) and microfilm copies of all issues of Ghana's ‘paper of record’, the Daily Graphic, from January 2003 through June 2008. Microfilm of the Daily Graphic from July 2008 to 2012 is not yet available, although most primaries for the 2008 elections had already been conducted by this point. Newspapers in Ghana often have political affiliations – the Chronicle devoted far more coverage to developments in the NPP, for example – but the Daily Graphic had more balanced coverage.

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56 Having a primary election is partly mechanically related to the number of aspirants who come forward to seek a party's nomination for parliament, since having only one aspirant always means no primary. Having more than one aspirant is necessary for, but does not mechanically imply a contested primary, since party leaders can still interfere to prevent primaries from taking place.

57 Outcomes for both election years can be viewed as largely independent decisions, in that party-constituencies that held primaries in 2004 were not more likely to have primaries in 2008 than those that did not have primaries in 2004. In our data, 65 per cent of the constituencies that did not have primaries in 2004 had primaries in 2008, while 69 per cent of constituencies that did have primaries in 2004 had them again in 2008.

58 For example, in Ellembelle constituency in the Western Region of Ghana, the NPP presidential candidate won 61 per cent of the vote in the 2004 election, but the NPP deferred to the CPP, a minor party, and did not field a parliamentary candidate. As the NPP prepared for the 2008 elections, a more realistic expectation of the potential support for a hypothetical future NPP parliamentary candidate, should the party have chosen to end the alliance, would have been something closer to the 61 per cent the party received in the 2004 presidential election than the 0 per cent it received by default in the 2004 parliamentary election.

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65 We created an index for the development level of a constituency created by conducting a factor analysis with a principal-component factor model of three extremely highly correlated measures of living conditions recorded in the 2000 Census data – percentage of households using electricity, percentage of households using modern sanitation facilities (toilet), and percentage of households with running water (either pipe-borne or from a tanker).

66 The proportions are statistically indistinguishable at higher numbers of aspirants because they are very close to 1 and the sample sizes become much smaller. We ignore the difference in proportions between observations with only one aspirant and those with additional aspirants because it is mechanically not possible to have a contested primary election with only one aspirant.

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