Electoral Politics Amid Africa's Urban Transition: a Study of Urban Ghana
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Electoral Politics Amid Africa's Urban Transition: A Study of Urban Ghana The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Nathan, Noah. 2016. Electoral Politics Amid Africa's Urban Transition: A Study of Urban Ghana. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493394 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Electoral Politics amid Africa’s Urban Transition: A Study of Urban Ghana A dissertation presented by Noah Louis Nathan to The Department of Government in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Political Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts December 2015 c 2015 — Noah Louis Nathan All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Robert H. Bates Author: Noah Louis Nathan Electoral Politics amid Africa’s Urban Transition: A Study of Urban Ghana Abstract 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? Electoral politics in African cities received significant attention in the independence era, but little polit- ical 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 si- multaneously 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 iii 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 politi- cal participation, patterns of distributive politics, the importance of neighborhood context, and the causes of ethnic political competition in new democracies. iv | Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgments vii 1 Elections in an Urbanizing Africa 1 1.1 The Changes and Challenges of Urban Growth . 1 1.2 Theories of the Political Effects of Urbanization in Africa . 7 1.3 The Argument . 14 1.4 Ghana and Beyond . 22 1.5 Taking Modernization Back Out, Keeping Institutions In . 30 1.6 Roadmap . 31 2 The Case and Data: Urbanization in Greater Accra 33 2.1 Introduction . 33 2.2 Ghana’s Political System . 33 2.3 Urbanization in Greater Accra . 37 2.4 Major Changes Due to Urbanization . 41 2.5 The Data . 50 3 Policy Preferences and Political Participation 58 3.1 Introduction . 58 3.2 Class and Political Competition . 60 3.3 Patronage Politics and Participation as Reinforcing . 62 3.4 Data Sources . 66 3.5 Empirical Analysis . 68 3.6 Conclusion . 83 4 Distributive Politics in Urban Areas 84 4.1 Introduction . 84 4.2 Mixed Patronage Strategies in Urban Areas . 88 4.3 Evidence . 93 4.4 Comparison to Rural Areas . 109 4.5 Conclusion . 117 5 Local Ethnic Geography and Voting in Urban Areas 118 5.1 Introduction . 118 5.2 Ethnic Voting in African Democracies . 121 v 5.3 Expectations Across Urban Neighborhoods . 123 5.4 Data Sources . 127 5.5 Empirical Results . 129 5.6 Alternative Explanations . 140 5.7 Conclusion . 143 6 Capture and its Consequences in Local Governments 145 6.1 Introduction . 145 6.2 Turnout, Capture, and Service Delivery . 148 6.3 Local Government in Greater Accra . 151 6.4 Data Sources . 157 6.5 Empirical Analysis . 159 6.6 Conclusion . 173 7 The Way Forward 175 7.1 The Way Forward . 175 7.2 Keep Waiting for Modernization? . 176 7.3 Or Stop Waiting? Potential Institutional Reforms . 178 Bibliography 190 A Appendix: Supporting Information 204 A.1 Chapter 1 . 204 A.2 Chapter 2 . 206 A.3 Chapter 3 . 210 A.4 Chapter 5 . 223 A.5 Chapter 6 . 257 vi | Acknowledgments Many people helped make this research possible. I especially thank my dissertation committee. Sitting in Bob Bates’s political economy of development lectures as a wide-eyed 19-year-old was one of the key events that piqued my intellectual curiosity in trying to understanding how societies in Africa politically develop. Ideas that I first encountered in that course are at the heart of this dissertation nearly a decade later. I am thankful for the advice Bob has dispensed since, continually pushing me to look up from the weeds and see the big picture. Nahomi Ichino has been a dedicated mentor for nearly 8 years. She first introduced me to Ghana – I walked into her office in January 2008 with a vague plan to study something somewhere in Africa and left with a concrete agenda to spend the next summer in Ghana. That trip sparked an interest in the country that has only strengthened over time. Since then, she has done more than anyone to teach me how political science works, as a teacher and a collaborator. All of my research is indebted to her patient guidance. Despite being on what must be a record number of dissertation committees, Steve Levitsky always made time to give detailed, constructive feedback on this project every step of the way, encouraging me to explore how my ideas extend beyond Africa and can have broader comparative relevance. His insights have been crucial in shaping the arguments here. Fieldwork was supported by funding from a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow- ship, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. In Ghana, I am indebted to Franklin Oduro, Adu Kakra Duayeden, and the gracious staff of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana). Primary research assistance in Accra was pro- vided by Alhassan Ibn Abdallah, Francis Addo, Mahmuda Ainoo, and Maame Gyesiwa Sam. I also thank Dr. Philomena Nyarko, Rosalind Quartey, and the Ghana Statistical Service for the census data; Anthony Amedzakey, Alex Poku Akubia, and Amadu Sulley at the Electoral Commission of Ghana; and Jonathan Phillips for teaching me how to use the survey software. At Harvard, I am grateful to my dissertation reading group – Julie Faller, Robert Schub, and Ariel White – for their help shaping this project from early brainstorming to final drafts. They became the other half of my dissertation committee. I would have gotten lost at multiple times in this process without them. Spe- cific chapters also benefitted from feedback from Adam Auerbach, Lorena Barberia, Adam Glynn, Shelby Grossman, Evelyne Huber, Horacio Larreguy, John Marshall, Jeffrey Paller, Jennifer Pan, Amanda Pinkston, Jonathan Phillips, Daniel Posner, Amanda Robinson, and Benjamin Schneer, as well as audience members at Harvard, Duke, the University of Michigan, APSA, and MPSA. I also thank my parents, for supporting me in this career and for pretending to understand what I was talking about through years of Sunday afternoon phone calls debriefing them on this project. Hopefully it makes a little more sense when you get to read this! Finally, I want to thank my wife, Mai Hassan. No one has been through more drafts of these pages and given more advice on this project than she has. vii 1 | Elections in an Urbanizing Africa 1.1 The Changes and Challenges of Urban Growth By the mid-1980s, Accra, the capital city of Ghana, already had over one million residents. But you did not need to drive far from the city center to find rural life. Seven miles (12km) northwest of downtown, for example, was Gbawe, a farming community nestled in the sloping hills overlooking the city. The 1984 census counted 837 residents. Almost all were Ga, the indigenous ethnic group of the Accra area. Most worked on small family farms. A chief’s palace sat at the center of the village, surrounded by traditional compound houses belonging to the community’s original Ga families (Gough & Yankson 2006). A photo of Gbawe taken a decade later in 1995, included in Gough & Yankson (2006), shows thatched reed roofs on the homes surrounding the palace, typical of poor villages in rural Ghana.