Description
Book SynopsisThis quantitative and qualitative account of Ghanaian development shows how closely fought elections drive subnational local state institutions to patronize party volunteers. Extrapolating from Ghana’s example, the author shows how locally salient varieties of patronage shape political competition in a variety of contexts.
Trade Review“Consistently insightful, clear yet nuanced, thought-provoking from the first page onwards, and engagingly written for a wider audience, this is one of the best books written on political parties in Africa in the last decade.” -- Nic Cheeseman, author of Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures, and the Struggle for Political Reform
“Barry Driscoll’s close-up, empirically meticulous study of clientelism in Ghana challenges a great deal of widely shared received wisdom on political linkages in electoral democracies. He shows that intense inter-party competition may actually magnify rather than reduce clientelistic allocation of benefits and that some variants of greater state capacity are quite compatible with extensive clientelism, if not facilitating it. The persuasiveness of Driscoll’s investigation follows from a research strategy that operates at three levels. It combines, first, thick description of local transactional practices based on personal observation in select administrative districts with, second, quantitative analysis of subnational linkage patterns across all of Ghana and, third, situating the Ghanaian experience of political linkage mechanisms in a broad regional comparative examination. Driscoll’s inquiry is thought provoking and should be required reading for any scholar venturing to contribute to the field of democratic linkage studies.” -- Herbert Kitschelt, coauthor of Patrons, Clients and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Local State in the Twenty-First Century
1 Why Some Districts Are Competitive: The Order of Local State Formation
2 Why Some Districts Fear Their Party Activists
3 Why (and How) Some Party Activists Get Patronage
4 Beyond Case Studies: Countrywide Analysis
5 Why Patronage and State Capacity Can Coexist
6 Some Comparative Perspective
