New Patriotic Party Research Articles

The politicization of education policies: The case of Ghana’s Free Senior High School Policy

While many scholars recognize and criticize the politicization of education policies, scholarly attention to the strategies politicians utilize to politicize educational policy discourses remains limited. Focusing on the officials of Ghana’s two major political parties, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), as policy actors, this paper investigates how officials of these two parties operationalized discussions regarding Ghana’s Free Senior High School Policy (FSHSP) to garner support for their parties while stoking resentment for their political opponents. The study employs a critical discourse analysis (CDA) framework and a dataset of 175 documents, including news stories, press releases, party manifestos, and government publications. The analysis reveals that both parties resorted to strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other presentation. The NPP contrasted its regime with the NDC’s tenure and framed the NDC as a threat to FSHSP and the education of the poor and vulnerable. The NDC problematized and highlighted implementation bottlenecks while framing the NPP and FSHSP as threats to quality education. I argue that through these strategies, NPP officials aimed to maintain incumbency while NDC officials advocated a regime change. The paper concludes by emphasizing the potential risks associated with politicizing education policies.

Without money, you are technically knock-out in the race: Analyzing the role of money in parliamentary primaries in Ghana

Financial resources – comprising money and other material support – are significant determinants in the prosecution of successful electoral campaigns, especially during intra-party candidate selection in Ghana. Delegates in political parties, largely, vote for candidates who can pay their way out; hence, the financially disadvantaged candidates are technically excluded from the race. The article examines this phenomenon which is incrementally making parliamentary primaries in Ghana the preserve of the rich. Empirical evidence from primary data gathered through interviews and focus group discussions as well as secondary data from published works was analyzed from a rational choice theory perspective. The article found that money does not only serve as a measure of a candidate’s success in the two leading political parties in Ghana – the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and New Patriotic Party (NPP) – but also a predictor of their future performance and an exclusionary barrier to the poor. It recommends strong legislation to regulate the funding of parliamentary primaries in Ghana. One of the first essential steps should be limiting the high amount of nomination forms and filing fees charged at the political party level.

The unfolding mystery of the numbers: First and second digits based comparative tests and its application to Ghana’s elections

This study focuses on the use of digits-based test in anomaly detection in presidential elections in Ghana. Even though Ghana has conducted several successful elections to elect presidents, the outcomes of the elections have been challenged in courts on allegations of vote rigging and fraud. It has been established in the literature that for an election to be anomaly free, the following should be satisfied: the distribution of voters turn-out, the winners’ share and total valid votes cast in the election should be uni-modal. Therefore, we assess the applicability of both first and second digits-based tests to aid in the detection of possible anomaly in the 2016 and 2020 presidential election results data in Ghana. The Benford frequency distribution and Spearman rank correlation coefficient tests were used for the analysis of data obtained from the Electoral Commission of Ghana. The results show that the observed first digits distributions of valid vote counts for both New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC), and the total valid votes cast (TVVC), in 2016 and 2020 are consistent with the distributional pattern of first digits postulated by Benford’s Law. However, the findings of the distribution of second digits of the valid vote counts for NPP and total valid vote cast in both 2016 and 2020 elections do not satisfy the probability distributional pattern of second digits according to the Benford’s Law. In view of these, we recommend using the first two digits-based tests to check for consistency of possible election anomaly between the first and second digits since it conveys more information.

Serial Callers: Hatchet Men or Political Communicators?

This article looks at the extent to which radio stations use offensive language, the reasons why serial callers use such language and how this threat to Ghana’s peace can be curtailed within the Tamale Metropolis. Using in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and content analysis as methods of investigation, the study found that among the political communicators on radio, serial callers used the most offensive language to defend either the New Patriotic Party (NPP) or the National Democratic Congress (NDC). The two parties sponsor the activities of these callers who, in return for stipends from politicians, fearlessly denigrate opponents while trumpeting their parties’ achievements. Unsubstantiated allegations against political opponents emerged as the most frequently used offensive pronouncement by serial callers who admit to the dangers of their conduct for peaceful co-existence but insist they must do everything possible to ensure victory for their parties. The study concludes that despite the threat posed by serial callers to peaceful co-existence, employing extra security measures to contain the situation is not an option. Instead, the study recommends that radio stations field technocrats in place of political party representatives to review newspaper headlines during Morning Show programmes.

‘Judicialization of corruption’ in Ghana: an analysis of how Ghanaians view the Office of the Special Prosecutor

ABSTRACT Anti-corruption agencies in Ghana have failed over the years to deal with corruption and also take decisive steps in tackling the menace. For this reason inter alia, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government in 2018 established the Office of the Special Prosecutor as an institutional response to deal assertively with the issue of corruption. This action expanded the scope and discourse on the fight against corruption in Ghana. Following from this, the paper conceptualised the new institutional endeavour to control corruption in Ghana, simply as the ‘judicialization of corruption’. By judicialization of corruption, the paper meant to portray a phenomenon where there is the use of judiciary and judicial processes in fighting corruption. Coming on the back of a political campaign promise, the paper seemly tested Ghanaian voters’ view on this new anti-corruption arrangement by the government and puts forward a broad-spectrum of views by voters regarding the creation of the OSP. The paper used mixed method to triangulate both qualitative and quantitative data. The result showed majority of voters backing government's idea to create the OSP albeit a sizeable number perceiving the OSP as a mere conduit to ‘witch-hunt’ erstwhile government officials.

Propaganda: The Media and Ghana’s 2020 Presidential Election Petition

This article examines the extent to which media bias is featured in the reportage of Ghana’s 2020 Presidential Election Petition. The Presidential Election Petition was filed by the main candidate of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), John Dramani Mahama who challenged the declaration by the Electoral Commission (EC) that President Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo Addo of the incumbent New Patriotic Party (NPP) won the election. Using a purposive sampling approach focusing on the print media, this paper assesses how three local newspapers-the NDC aligned WhatsApp news online, the NPP aligned Daily Statesman online and State-sponsored Daily Graphic online covered the event and the extent to which media bias played in the coverage of the election petition. The study found that propaganda and media bias featured prominently in the coverage of the election petition and constituted a substantial risk of undermining press freedom and the country’s growing democracy. The study recommends, amongst others, training for journalists on how to detect bias and propaganda statements from story actors to obviate the potential of publishing propaganda-driven statements that could threaten the peace and stability of the country.

The Readability of Political Party Manifestos of the 2016 General Elections in Ghana

The objective of the study was to determine the readability of the manifestos that three political parties, namely National Democratic Congress (NDC), New Patriotic Party (NPP) and Convention People’s Party (CPP), in Ghana used in the 2016 general elections. These parties were chosen because they were the only ones in Ghana with parliamentary representation at the time of the study. The readability indexes used were the Coleman-Liau Index and the Gunning Fog Index. 12 random sections of each manifesto were selected for analysis. Then, texts of no less than 300 words were sampled from each section. The readability formulas used were available on the internet. The statistics show that all three manifestos were written at difficulty levels that were quite above the reading abilities of the average Ghanaian voter. Further, it was found that the manifestos did not differ significantly from each other, statistically speaking. Keywords: readability, readability formulas, manifestos, political parties, linguistic complexity

Journalistic ethics and elections news coverage in the Ghanaian press: a content analysis of two daily Ghanaian newspaper coverage of election 2020

PurposeThis study investigates the incidence of ethical violations in the Ghanaian press which has become topical in the wake of misinformation in a charged political atmosphere. Public interest institutions have questioned the unprofessional conduct of journalists covering election campaigns in recent years. This study content analysed political stories from two leading Ghanaian newspapers (Daily Graphic and Daily Guide) to determine the nature and extent of ethical violations, and to examine the level of prominence accorded to political news stories by the two dailies.Design/methodology/approachThis paper relied on qualitative content analysis for data gathering and analysis. A total of 387 political news items published between 1 October and 30 November 2020, were analysed.FindingsThis study found infractions of various nature to Article 1 of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) codes of ethics, chief among which is the deliberate publications of news stories without cross-checking facts. Other infractions to Articles 17, 11, 6 and 5 of the GJA codes of ethics were observed. Political news coverage favours the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) than any other parties, with the two parties (NPP-NDC) given greater prominence and salience by the Ghanaian press.Originality/valueThe research makes a modest contribution to the growing concern of journalism ethics in an increasing ecology of fake news.

Structuration Theory and Its Relevance in Research: Power Structures, Constituency Agency and Organizational Change in the New Patriotic Party (NPP)

Structuration Theory and Its Relevance in Research: Power Structures, Constituency Agency and Organizational Change in the New Patriotic Party (NPP)

The policy or the person? A corpus-based functional analysis of manifestos of two political parties in Ghana

Containing the set of policies that political parties stand for and wish to implement if they are elected to govern a country, manifestos are a campaign tool used by political parties to persuade the citizenry to vote in a certain direction. This paper uses corpus-linguistic methods to investigate the key concepts in the manifestos of two Ghanaian political parties, namely: the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National democratic Congress (NDC). The objective is to examine the strategies and the focus of the manifestos of the two parties. The analysis reveals that while the NPP target both policy and the personalities of their opponent candidates, the NDC appear to focus mainly on policy. The paper concludes that, be it a focus on policy or personality, contextual relevance is the key. Thus, the paper proposes a relevance model of political campaign discourse. The paper has implications for political discourse, political campaigning and political communication.

A Comparative Analysis of the Social and Demographic Factors in Ghanaian Political Party Affiliations

ABSTRACT Since 1992, political power in Ghana alternates between the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP). Yet beyond extrapolations from previous election results not much is known about the socio-demographic characteristics of the core membership of these two political parties. Using data from the Ghana Opinion Poll study conducted by the Centre for Policy Research and the Fredrich Ebert Stiftung, Ghana in April 2018, this study employed a multinomial logistic regression model to understand the social and demographic features around which support for the political parties in Ghana coalesced. We found that age of the respondent, education, employment, region of residence, ethnicity and religion are significant predictors of partisan affiliation. Notwithstanding the NDC’s electoral success over the years, we observe a process of political realignment that favours the NPP across most of the demographic variables analysed. The study has implications for the mobilisation and recruitment strategies of both political parties.

Schematic Structure of Manifesto Launch Speeches of Three Political Parties

A key pre-election spoken genre in several modern democracies is unarguably the manifesto launch speech. Yet, it has surprisingly received either very little or no scholarly attention. Consequently, from a rhetorical perspective, this study examined the schematic structure of three keynote speeches delivered by presidential aspirants of three leading political parties in Ghana – New Patriotic Party (NPP), National Democratic Congress (NDC), and the Convention People’s Party (CPP) – to launch their political parties’ manifestos in 2016. The three speeches delivered by the presidential candidates of the three parties constituted the data set for the study. Applying the popular Swalesean rhetorical move analysis, originally meant for the academic setting, the study identified the use of a nine-move pattern as the schematic structure for the genre across the three speeches, with four ambiguous moves. These findings of the study have implication for the standardizing of the schematic structure of manifesto launch speeches worldwide and, thus, contributes to the scholarship on the political manifesto genre, political communication as well as further research on manifesto launch speeches in other democracies around the world.

Exploring Political Parties on Facebook: Literature Review of the Two Main Political Parties in Ghana

Abstract Ghana currently has over 25 registered political parties. The two key political parties in Ghana are the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC). Before the introduction of social media, especially Facebook, political parties in Ghana employed traditional communication strategies, such as TV, Radio, and News Papers, to execute political communication. However, since 2012 political parties in Ghana have deployed and relied heavily on social media platforms, particularly Facebook, as a political communication tool to disseminate their political manifestoes to the electorates in order to clinch political power. This article adopted a purely descriptive approach with an emphasis on document analysis to review relevant information and literature for the study. Hence literature is sourced from secondary sources like a pool of online libraries, political party’s websites/Facebook pages, and other scholarly research related to the subject under investigation. The objective of this paper is to carefully explore political parties on Facebook, emphasizing the two main Political parties in Ghana, thus the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Advances in Social Media and Political Campaigns in Elections: An Assessment of the 2016 General Elections in Ghana

Initially meant for social networking and interacting with acquaintances, the new media in the form of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are now becoming crucial instruments in political communication. This is because social media has proven to be an effective format for political communication given its several features like photo sharing, status update, tags, post sharing, likes, live videos, video sharing amongst others. Furthermore, social media has democratised media access, and has afforded people who have previously been side-lined by traditional media an important platform for political mobilization. Most importantly, it has generated interest in politics among young people. The intersection between traditional media and other social media has augmented their efficiency by amplifying their reach. The study is an explorative one that adopted purposive sampling to select participants from the New Patriotic Party (NPP), National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the Progressive People’s Party (PPP). The findings revealed that although presidential candidates integrated social media into their campaign they are yet to exploit its full potential. However, social media by itself could not guarantee a candidate victory in the elections. Therefore, presidential candidates need to strike a balance between their campaigns on social media with the ground campaigns to ensure that they reach most of the electorate.

From Agroforestry to Agroindustry: Smallholder Access to Benefits From Oil Palm in Ghana and the Implications for Sustainability Certification

Oil palm production in Ghana—which is primarily cultivated by smallholders (60%+)—plays an important role in local economies and rural livelihoods. As a multi-functional crop, it is embedded in the everyday life of rural and urban Ghanaians both by individual households and on an industrial level. The sector is currently experiencing a resurgence under Ghana’s New Patriotic Party (NPP) rule and is being targeted by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) for yield intensification and increased export production. End goals of these efforts include poverty alleviation, environmentally responsible development efforts, and agricultural diversification in rural areas. We apply Ribot and Peluso’s “theory of access” (2003) to assess the barriers and opportunities for smallholder oil palm farmers, and the degree to which these are addressed by RSPO interventions. Our results highlight how Ghanaian smallholders gain many benefits from palm oil production as a source of regular income, a drought-resilient crop, and a source of cooking oil for household use. However, they also report different levels of access to finance, markets, land, and technical support, along with differing views and visions of the oil palm sector’s development. The focus of governmental and RSPO initiatives on international trade-based incentives overlooks this diversity and, in particular, the importance of local markets for Ghanaian livelihoods. This poses a threat to women millers and traders, poorer producers, and the local markets they supply who risk losing access to the palm oil supply chain. More generally, these findings illustrate the importance of understanding how markets interact at multiple local to international scales, in order to design interventions that will more equitably reach and benefit local communities.

Using Social Media to Campaign: Are Ghanaian Political Parties Getting It Right

It is an undeniable fact that in recent years internet usage has increased in the area of information dissemination in Ghana. Indeed, when the roll call is made Ghana would not be found wanting on the league of African countries with internet penetration and social media usage. According to Ramamohanarao et al, (2007), interment usage has become one of the easiest tools for seeking information and the fastest for that matter in communicating with friends and loved ones. Due to the comparative advantage, social media has over traditional media, it has become a means by which many are using it to reach their targeted audience at the shortest possible time. The study investigates how some selected supporters of the two major political parties in Ghana, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) use social media platforms to campaign for and to woo potential voters for their respective parties. The study was undertaken as desk research and the research relied on secondary sources with particular reference to posts of some supporters of the two leading parties in Ghana, who have all in the last two to three decades have had the opportunity of ruling in the country ever since the country returned to democratic rule. The results revealed that indeed supporters of the two major political parties through social media with particular reference to Facebook use the internet to both propagate the ideologies and philosophies of their political parties, making social media a vital platform for campaigning and also allowing the Ghanaian populace to participate in political activities.

Spatial planning through the political landscape of Ghana: examining the nexus between election manifestos and planning

ABSTRACT There is limited academic research on the interplay between spatial planning and partisan politics, particularly within the context of Africa, where it is argued that spatial planning institutions are not mutually exclusive from partisan political influences. This study is a contribution towards addressing this gap. It presents a comprehensive analysis and discussions of the state of spatial planning as captured by political manifestos in Ghana within the time window of the Fourth Republic. Specifically, the study employs a self-explanatory four-stage framework to analyze the manifesto documents of two dominant political parties in Ghana – the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) – focusing on how spatial planning terminologies and targets are used and set, respectively. The analysis reveals that political parties in Ghana have demonstrated some level of interests in promoting spatial planning. However, the adequacy and conformity of such interests to the wider spatial planning issues and long-term spatial development frameworks of Ghana remain questionable. The study suggests practical approaches to overcome this challenge. We believe that urban planners, planning researchers and policy-makers can draw valuable insights from our findings in terms of how spatial planning can be (re)conceptualized in advancing the agenda for sustainable urban development.

One Election, Two Victories: Ghana’s 2016 General Elections Revisited

This article examines election-related violence that characterizes some electoral processes across Africa. The study thematically focussed on two dominant political parties in Ghana, thus the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in respect of the December 2016 Presidential election. These two political parties have alternated executive power in Ghana since the birth of the Fourth Republic in January 1993, with Ghana having failed to maintain the status quo immediately after independence from British colonial rule. The claims and counterclaims of victory immediately after polls closed in the December, 2016 Presidential and Parliamentary elections, brought Ghana to the brink of election violence. Both parties’ counter-claimed victory, purportedly based on ‘results’ obtained from their polling agents posted across the various polling stations in all the 275 constituencies. The Electoral Commission (EC), which supervised the general election was surprisingly mute in declaring the winner of the 2016 Presidential election in the midst of these controversies. This paper argues that the vacuum created by the EC per its delay in the declaration of certified Presidential election results after polls had closed, was a blot on Ghana’s status as the beacon of democracy and peace in Africa.

A Freezing Moment in Ghana’s Party System: How Two Thorns in Nkrumah’s Side Framed Elections in the Fourth Republic

Abstract Ghanaian elections in the Fourth Republic demonstrate clear regional patterns. The National Democratic Congress (NDC) wins the vast majority of the vote in Volta Region, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) earns its largest victories in Asante Region, and the remaining eight regions are more competitive. This article explores the genesis of these patterns and finds that they first revealed themselves in Ghana’s Second Republic when two ethnopolitical groups who had fought Nkrumah’s nationalizing efforts took advantage of their organizational capacities. They adopted the ideological labels of the First Republic to fill the political vacuum left by the departure of the country’s popular independence leader. This nuanced reading of Ghana’s partisan history stands in contrast to both popular contemporary accounts and predictions raised in the literature on the creation of party systems.

Gender, Power and Institutional Change – The Role of Formal and Informal Institutions in Promoting Women’s Political Representation in Ghana

The article explores the role of formal and informal institutions in influencing the representation of women in the two major political parties in Ghana – NDC (National Democratic Congress) and NPP (New Patriotic Party) – as well as the small party CPP (Convention People’s Party). Paradoxically, with its first president, Kwame Nkrumah (CPP), Ghana was one of the first countries in Africa to introduce a quota in 1959, reserving ten seats for women in Parliament. With a representation of 11% women after the election in 2012 and 13% after the election in 2016, however, Ghana has not been part of the positive development on the continent. Drawing on the body of literature on feminist institutionalism, the article explores the dynamics of power and change relating to the low representation of women in politics in Ghana. It further investigates responses to initiatives to promote more female candidates in Parliament – the reduction of filing fees and the introduction of women’s seats. The article argues that the formal institutions in the form of party structures work both as an obstacle and an opportunity to promote more women in politics, and that the informal structures in the form of the gender culture in Parliament and verbal abuse work against more women in politics.