- Title
- Ghana’s disputed elections of 1992 and 2012: the significance of political culture
- Creator
- Appiah-Thompson, Christopher
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- The wave of democratization that washed over much of Africa in the 1990s saw numerous one-party states grapple with the challenges of establishing workable multi-party democracies. A particular challenge, commonly experienced by many democratizing states, was the phenomenon of the disputed election, usually characterised by a refusal of the losing party (or parties) to accept the results. Ghana was no exception to this problem. Yet Ghana did not experience the scale and severity of violence as similarly situated nations like Kenya and Nigeria. Ghana had much in common with these two states—all three were former one-party states with multi-ethnic polities, troubled economies, similar electoral systems, and shared (though historically different) colonial experiences of British suzerainty. This raises the question of what was different about Ghana’s experience of democratization that enabled it to avoid these outcomes when it dealt with two bitterly disputed elections in 1992 and 2012 respectively. Both elections saw the losing parties vigorously refusing to accept the outcome, though in different ways. In 1992 there were widespread public protests and violent acts ranging from intimidation and beatings to bombings that took some serious negotiations to resolve. In 2012, there were some public protests, but this time the losing parties chose to petition the Supreme Court to rule on perceived anomalies in the election process that the petitioners felt influenced the outcome. In both instances the parties eventually agreed to accept the electoral victories as declared by the Electoral Commission of Ghana. The thesis treats these two elections and their aftermath as “critical junctures” in the development of Ghana’s post-1992 democracy. They also serve as a vehicle for considering an important facet of Ghana’s democratization trajectory, namely the transformation of its architecture of electoral governance. Hence the thesis poses three inter-related questions: 1. What were the varying institutional causes of the Ghanaian disputed 1992 and 2012 presidential elections and their respective consequences? 2. What strategies were adopted by the political and/or electoral actors in the administration and resolution of these two disputed elections? 3. What were the various moderating causal effects of the Ghanaian political culture on the functioning of the electoral institutions during these post-electoral disputes? Adopting a comparative historical analysis approach, the thesis pursues answers to these questions by examining the causes and consequences of these two electoral disputes and their resolution. The core argument of the thesis is that a key part of Ghanaian political culture, namely powerful traditional authorities and their enforcement of shared societal values (such as tolerance, consensus-building and peaceful coexistence), served as an effective means to restrain violent behaviour and paved the way for these serious electoral disputes to be resolved in a relatively peaceful manner. The importance of political culture as an explanatory variable has tended to be neglected in analyses of the causes and consequences of these two disputed elections. Indeed, as a concept ‘political culture’ remains underutilised in much of the contemporary scholarship on democratization. Exploring these two election disputes and the quite different historical junctures in which they occurred provides the means to explore, conceptually and materially, the contribution of political culture to Ghana’s experience of democratization. The thesis demonstrates the importance of political culture for understanding the predominantly peaceful resolution of these two disputes. It also demonstrates how the lens of political culture enables an understanding of how and why such resolutions were possible in practice. In so doing the thesis provides a more nuanced understanding of the importance of Ghanaian political culture for consolidating its democracy. The thesis concludes with a brief consideration of some theoretical and policy implications for the study and practice of democratic governance in Ghana (and the African experience of democratization more generally).
- Subject
- electoral governance; political culture; democratization; judicial review; disputed elections; customary institutions
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1479276
- Identifier
- uon:50284
- Rights
- Copyright 2021 Christopher Appiah-Thompson
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 288 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |