Sector-based vote choice: A new approach to explaining core and swing voters in Africa

Abstract

This study examines economic components of the support base for each party in Ghana’s de facto two-party system. Most accounts of partisan voting in African democracies contend that some voters routinely support the same party because it rewards co-ethnics through patronage in the form of private and local community goods. A few recent studies have found that some voters vote retrospectively and sociotropically, rewarding or punishing the incumbent party on the basis of its overall performance in office. However, neither the ethno-clientelist account nor the performance assessment account addresses the possibility that African parties build their support bases around competing economic policy interests. Using a merged dataset from the Afrobarometer Survey Round 5 and district-level industrial employment and agricultural production data from Ghana, I find that it is economic interests by agricultural sub-sector that are highly predictive of parties’ issue-based platforms. Voters who do not share a common interest with any of the main parties’ key policies are most likely to switch party preferences election to election.