Microfoundations: Voting for Public Goods in Ghana

Abstract

AbstractChapter 5 evaluates the core assumption underlying the argument that voters in Africa engage in evaluative voting and condition their support on the provision of public goods and services. This assumption is crucial because without it there would be no reason to think that politicians should implement pro-rural policies in order to win rural votes. Moreover, it is not obvious that the assumption holds, because existing work on the determinants of voter choice in African elections has focused predominantly on issues of clientelism and ethnic voting. In examining whether voters in Africa use elections to hold governments accountable for their performance in office, Chapter 5 narrows the focus to a single country, Ghana. Doing so accounts for important contextual variations in how goods are provided, which influence the extent to which responsibility for this provision can be attributed to political action. The analysis uses data on two types of goods to investigate whether Ghanaian voters are evaluative. First it looks at education, considering a range of inputs at the district level. Usefully, analysis of this data supports the idea that voters are more likely to condition their support on the provision of goods and services which can be attributed to political action than on those which cannot. Acknowledging limitations to inference resulting from aggregation to the district level, the chapter then turn to roads. Analysis of an original panel dataset containing detailed information on road conditions throughout Ghana provides even more robust evidence that electoral support is affected by the provision of public goods.