Electoral Politics Amid Africa's Urban Transition: A Study of Urban Ghana
| Autor: | Nathan, Noah |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: | |
| Druh dokumentu: | Text |
| Popis: | Africa is rapidly urbanizing. With so many African voters now living in cities, understanding African electoral politics now requires understanding the politics of urban areas. How does urbanization affect the accountability relationships between voters and politicians? Answering this question means answering a series of more specific empirical questions: what do urban voters want from the government? Which types of urban voters participate in politics and which do not? How do urban voters choose which candidates to support? How do politicians campaign in cities? Which types of urban voters do politicians seek to favor with state resources? %These are the core empirical questions examined in the dissertation. Electoral politics in African cities received significant attention in the independence era, but little political science research has examined these cities in the contemporary democratic period. The small literature that has is largely supportive of modernization approaches. Modernization theories expect a series of socio-economic transformations created by urbanization to reduce the political importance of ethnicity and the prevalence of clientelism and other forms of patronage-based politics. But I argue that urbanization also simultaneously creates conditions that reinforce incentives for patronage distribution, clientelism, and ethnic voting. Scarcity in the provision of basic services in contexts of low state capacity encourages politicians to continue employing patronage-based appeals. This solidifies many voters' incentives to support ethnically-aligned parties and drives the new urban middle class away from active political participation, lowering pressure on urban politicians to engage in programmatic, policy-based competition. I explore these incentives through a detailed study of Greater Accra, the largest metropolitan area in Ghana. I combine original survey data and survey experiments, fine-grained geo-coded census data, and extensive qualitative evidence to explore voters' policy preferences, vote choices, and patterns of political participation, as well as politicians' strategies in a cross-section of urban neighborhoods. The findings suggest that rather than pulling political competition in one direction, as modernization theories expect, urbanization in Africa instead moves political outcomes in multiple directions at once: reinforcing ethnic competition and clientelism in some neighborhoods, while undermining these forms of political competition in other neighborhoods within the same city at the same time. Studies of the effects of urbanization must recognize that these dual realities co-exist within African cities. In addition to building our understanding of urban politics in Africa, the dissertation contributes to broader political science debates about the emergence of programmatic competition, determinants of political participation, patterns of distributive politics, the importance of neighborhood context, and the causes of ethnic political competition in new democracies. Government |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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