Responding to Constituent's Demands: Survival Strategies of Legislators in Ghana's Fourth Republic

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In new democracies, what strategies do legislators adopt in pursuit of political survival? We argue that where the provision of development and public goods is in short supply relative to demand and politics is deemed clientelistic, citizens nevertheless have well-defined expectations of roles and responsibilities of their legislators which are in most part development-oriented. Increasingly, political survival in such emerging democracies depends on a novel combination of the provision of private and public or collective goods on the part of political elites. Responding to constituents' expectations, legislators expend their resources (time and funds) in their quotidian engagements with their constituents in such a manner that they are able to survive the next election. We argue that contrary to most of the existing literature, political elites are providing a combination of private and collective goods, and though legislators in electorally safe constituencies may provide more collective goods, they nevertheless provide private goods in equal measure to their counterparts in competitive constituencies in their bid for political survival. Using data on citizens' perceptions about their representatives' behavior in Ghana collected before and after the 2008 parliamentary election, and ethnographic data on two Ghanaian parliamentarians in 2009, we examine the political survival strategies of legislators in Ghana's Fourth Republic. In doing so, we compare the survival strategies of Members of Parliament in safe seats to the strategies adopted by Members of Parliament in competitive seats.