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Cost of ruling: An examination of political business cycle, governmental accountability, and alternation in power in Ghana’s democracy

ABSTRACT Ghana’s past is littered with frequent swapping of regimes and governments, but often these alternations in power were of the unconstitutional type, triggered by men in uniform. Since the introduction of democracy in 1992, however, the two main political parties, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), have through competitive elections taken turns in ruling the country. While there are few salient issues that divide the two parties, no single variable predicts a winner, sealing the fate of a ruling party, more than the handling of the national economy. The goal of this study is to review two realities in political economy that often impact elections in industrialized democracies and determine the extent to which these are salient in Ghana’s electoral contests. These two realities are the popularity-function and the vote-function. In a typical election, voters consider the popularity of the incumbent party and how it performed on the economy when deciding to either reward it or throw it out of office (popularity-function). On the other hand, through the vote-function paradigm, an incumbent party pays a cost for ruling. Depending on the size of this mathematical constant, an incumbent party gets re-elected or rejected because it either kept faith with the electorate or failed to meet expectations. How does a ruling party react to these realities? Several studies have shown that incumbent parties in Ghana and other emerging democracies manipulate key economic variables in an election year to win over voters. While this is the general expectation of the Political Business Cycle theory, this article posits that a mediating factor—voter’s tribal affiliation—works to neutralize any “windfall of votes” expected from manipulating the economy. Thus, this study concludes that there is a consistent and stabilizing cost of ruling in Ghanaian politics, a development that points to early stages of a responsive and accountable political system.