Final Dissertation
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Digital Media and Presidential Campaigning in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Study of the 2016 Election in Ghana Matthew O. Adeiza A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2019 Reading Committee: Matthew J. Powers, Chair Kirsten A. Foot Leah M. Ceccarelli Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Communication ©Copyright 2019 Matthew O. Adeiza University of Washington Abstract Digital Media and Presidential Campaigning in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Study of the 2016 Election in Ghana Matthew O. Adeiza Chair of the Supervisory Committee Dr. Matthew J. Powers Department of Communication The dissertation is a study of how presidential campaigns in new democracies in Sub- Saharan Africa use digital media to organize their teams and mobilize voters, with a focus on the 2016 presidential election in Ghana. Political campaigns aim to reach and convince the highest number of voters possible to vote for the campaigns’ preferred candidates. To do this, they use different strategies and tools to communicate their ideas and promises to voters. The literature on African elections suggests that campaigns try to mobilize voters by developing clientelist relationships with them, and they mostly engage in valence campaigning because they do not have ideological policies to communicate. The literature on political campaigning in the US and Western Europe suggests that campaigns increasing aim to develop custom online platforms to organize their teams, raise funds, and mobilize voters. The goal of the dissertation was to investigate how these scholarly assertions held up in the 2016 presidential election in Ghana. The study was centered on a four-month fieldwork in the country that included interviews with, and observations of, major political actors in the months before the November 2016 election. The study advances three major arguments. First, contrary to received wisdom, campaigns in Ghana relied on ideology for differentiating themselves from their opponents and for appealing to voters. An ideographic analysis of official party statements and transcripts of interviews with both the incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) campaign leaders and members shows that both parties used distinct ideological languages to mobilize voters. Second, campaigns used digital media, specifically Whatsapp, for mostly internal organizing while depending on campaign members for voter mobilization. In addition, digital media use played a complementary rather than a central role in how campaigns mobilized voters. This approach, necessitated in part by low digital media penetration in the country, could be described as relationship-based campaigning in contrast to technology-based campaigning that is common in the West as documented in political communication literature. Finally, the dissertation demonstrates that Ghanaian campaigns did not compete primarily by trying to build clientelist relationships with voters. The campaigns, especially the NPP, did not have the capacity to build such relationships, and available voting data indicates that clientelism does not explain voting patterns in the last five presidential election cycles. The dissertation therefore calls for a more nuanced understanding of the interaction of digital media use and the context in which their used in new democracies Table of Contents Table of Contents .................................................................................................................... i List of Tables ......................................................................................................................... iii List of Figure ....................................................................................................................................................... iii List of Abbreviations ............................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ v Chapter 1: Introduction and Context ....................................................................................... 1 The 2016 Presidential Election in Ghana ............................................................................................................. 8 Political Identity, Ideology, and Campaigning in Africa ..................................................................................... 12 Clientelism, Ethnicity, and Elections in Sub-Saharan Africa .............................................................................. 21 Digital Media and Political Campaigning ........................................................................................................... 25 Methods ............................................................................................................................................................ 36 Main Arguments ................................................................................................................................................ 42 Preview of Chapters .......................................................................................................................................... 46 Chapter 2: Ideology-less Political Parties, Ideology Discourses, and Ideographs .................... 48 Social Identity and Personal Identity ................................................................................................................. 51 Social Identity and Collective Action ................................................................................................................. 52 Social Identities in Ghanaian Politics ................................................................................................................. 53 Social Identity and Political Ideology ................................................................................................................. 61 Ghanaian Political Parties’ Use of Political Ideology ......................................................................................... 67 Party Ideology and Political Identity .................................................................................................................. 90 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................................... 91 Chapter 3: Digital Media and Political Campaign Organizations ........................................... 94 The Communication Ecosystem of Ghana ......................................................................................................... 96 The Campaign Organizations ........................................................................................................................... 105 Organizing and Managing Political Campaigns with Digital Media ................................................................. 114 Surveillance, Control, and Resistance within Campaigns ................................................................................ 126 i Beyond Digital Media: Relationship-Based Campaigning ................................................................................ 130 Interactions Between Uses of Traditional and Digital Media .......................................................................... 136 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................... 140 Chapter 4: Digital Media, Presidential Campaigning, and Multiethnic Democracy ............... 141 Democracy in Decline and the Arrival of Digital Media ................................................................................... 141 Elections and Democratization in New Democracies ...................................................................................... 143 Ghanaian Campaigns from a Comparative Perspective .................................................................................. 164 Political Campaigning and Clientelism in Ghana ............................................................................................. 150 Campaigning, Clientelism, and Chiefs as Middlemen ...................................................................................... 152 Digital Media and Voter Mobilization ............................................................................................................. 166 Chapter 5: Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 176 Findings and Implications ................................................................................................................................ 176 Limitations ....................................................................................................................................................... 182 Recommendations for Future Research .......................................................................................................... 185 Appendices .......................................................................................................................... 188 Appendix I: Methods and Fieldwork ............................................................................................................... 188 Appendix II: Research and Election Artifacts