Political Economy of Elections and Voting Behaviour in Ghana’s Fourth Republic

This book brings to the fore the interplay between economics, elections and politics in Ghana’s Fourth Republic. It examines the determinants and consequences of voting with an explicit emphasis on elections and the economy, and explains the state of academic understanding of how voters’ respond to economic stimuli, attribute responsibility and hold political parties and elected representatives electorally accountable. In addition, the book reveals the consequences of voting, and how regularities in voting behaviour influence policy making, redistribution and specific policy making. Economic development-related issues have consistently ranked among the most important issues in elections, meaning that the economic vote is the strongest evidence that citizens’ actually hold those who govern them accountable in the new democracies. This book, therefore, provides one of the first analyses of the relationship between elections, economic development-related issues and voting behaviour by providing an empirical analysis within the multi-party democratic framework of Ghana’s Fourth Republic.