Partisanship and political accountability in new democracies: Explaining compliance with formal rules and procedures in Ghana

Abstract

Standard political agency models generally predict an inverse relationship between the degree of partisan allegiance among citizens and political accountability. Does variation in voter attachments to political parties influence the behavior of public officials in new democracies? I take advantage of data from a unique audit of local governments in Ghana—the Functional Organizational Assessment Tool (FOAT)—to examine the impact of partisanship on public officials’ compliance with formal rules and procedures. Because unattached or weakly attached voters are more responsive to the performance of incumbent officials, they are more likely to deter rent seeking, corruption, and other administrative malpractices. Analysis of the baseline FOAT results provides strong support for this idea: compliance with formal rules and procedures is significantly higher in districts where voters evince weak attachments to political parties. This result is robust to controls for alternate explanations and sheds light on the conditions under which politicians would abjure rent seeking and corruption, even in the context of a new democracy where they have so much opportunity to do so.