Education and Other Determinants of Political Support in a New State: the Case of Ghana

Abstract

INCE DAVID EASTON first formulated the concept of political support in his seminal work,A Systems Analysis of Political Life ( 1965: 159), a number of investigators have attempted to operationalize the concept. The bulk of these works has been undertaken in the United States and industrialized countries of Western Europe. Their primary focus has been to pinpoint the correlates of support for either a single political leadership and institution such as legislators and the legislature (Boynton, Patterson and Hedlund 1968: 163-80; Patterson, Wahlke and Boynton 1973: 282-313; Boynton and Loewenberg 1973: 169-89; Patterson and Boynton 1974: 56); or support for multiple leaders and institutions (Abramson and Inglehart 1970: 419-42; Dennis 1975: 187-230). At times the object of support has been the entire political system (Loewenberg 1973: 142-56; Citrin, McClosky, Shanks and Sniderman 1975: 1-31). It has been established from such studies that among the important correlates of political support are formal education, urban and mass media exposure, ethnicity, significant life cycle experiences and the individual's level of political consciousness. The effects of these variables on political support in the industrialized countries are by and large positive. But their effect on political support in the new states, especially in Africa, is mixed. For instance, while Hayward (1974: 165-92) found formal education to be positively associated with supportive orientations toward the Ghanaian political system, Abernethy in Nigeria (1969: 217), Koff and Von der Muhll in Tanzania and Kenya (1967: 13-51) and Achola in Ghana (1980: Chapter V) found that in a number of instances formal education, urban exposure and ethnicity had a negative association with political support. Apart from the conflicting evidence regarding the correlates of political support in new African states, there is a general dearth of studies which investigate the determinants of political support. A study by Patterson, Wahlke and Boynton (1973: 293) developed a model of the determinants of support for the legislative institution, but no attempt was made to test the model empirically. Nonetheless, a few works exist which have developed and tested with empirical data models of the determinants of political participation (Nie, Powell and Prewitt 1971: 406-30; Beck and