Economics and government popularity in Ghana

Abstract

While the evidence for economic voting in industrialized countries is strong, relatively little attention has been paid to developing countries in general or Africa in particular. This study uses data from the 1999 Afrobarometer survey in Ghana to test for individual-level economic voting as a government popularity function. I employ OLS and logit models to demonstrate that economic considerations, especially prospective economic evaluations, prove significant in explaining government support, which is highly correlated with voting behavior. However, these models also demonstrate that long-term structural factors like ethnicity, geography and partisan identification still play significant roles.