Political Vigilantism in Ghana: A subnational Analysis of Electoral Violence

• In Event: Post-Conflict Politics in Africa

Abstract

A noticeable trend in emerging democracies since the early 1990s is the push for deepening processes of democratic culture especially the holding of competitive, multiparty elections. While progress has been made in this regard, numerous cases have seen the process characterized by a new form of political violence – electoral violence. For the African continent, recent years have seen states such as Kenya, Cote D’Ivoire, Zimbabwe and Togo each experience bouts of electoral violence to varying degrees. As a result, most comparative politics literature has focused disproportionately on cross-national explanations of electoral violence. For instance, scholars have often suggested that electoral violence is a feature of democracies in transition, occasioned by existing faultlines of ethnic, tribal or religious lines (Snyder, 2000), and/or often associate electoral violence with poor democratic countries which lack the institutional capacity necessary to hold the democratic process together (Collier, 2009; Bates, 2008). The tendency to focus on cross-national explanations, while important, has resulted in scholars’ oversight of within country variation. This project addresses this gap, asking what accounts for variations in electoral violence outcome within a country? To answer this question, I analyze an increasingly rampant form of electoral violence seen in many African states – political vigilantism. Political vigilantism is defined as activities of violent gangs recruited with the tacit support of the political elites to serve their political interests in electioneering cycles (Edu-Afful and Adottey-Pappoe 2016). For instance, in Nigeria, politicians have resorted to this strategy, recruiting violent gangs as hit squads and storm troopers to do their biddings in electoral processes. In Ghana, political parties own armed groups whom they task with intimating political opponents and causing disruptions for political party advantage. Ghana is a particularly important case as the phenomenon has become progressively rampant across the country’s political and electoral space since its return to constitutional democracy in 1992. This paper explores the determinants of political vigilantism in Ghana since 1992 using quantitative analysis. I argue and show that political vigilante activities appear to be most likely to occur when there are poor economic/living conditions and when there is a low police presence within a district. Analyzing quantitative data on political vigilantism in Ghana from the early 1990s illustrates that subnational variations in the phenomenon are likely linked to these two indicators. Theoretically, I first suggest that high unemployment and dwindled economic opportunities for young people creates incentives for trading violence for political patronage as a means of economic survival. Under these conditions, individuals are more likely to fall prey to recruitment by politicians and political parties who want to instrumentalize violence for political gains and political power. Second, given that political vigilante violence is illegal/criminal activity with expectations that violators be punished under the laws of the state, political elite may, at times, undermine this process. However, where strong enough institutional deterrence exists to punish behavior, individuals are more likely to be deterred from engaging in political vigilantism due to the costs of the behavior and credibility of punishment. I test the central hypotheses with data on economic conditions represented by poverty rates of different administrative units sourced from the Ghana Statistical Service and contained in in the Ghana Poverty Mapping of 2015. Data on police presence, proxied by the number of police presence in a region, is drawn from the Ghana Police Service official sources. To capture the main independent variable, political vigilantism, I pull from open source materials and data sets (GTD, ACLED, etc.) to record both presence of political vigilante groups and incidents of political vigilante attacks between 1992 to 2016. This sub-national analysis not only helps explain conditionalities and variations in the degree of political vigilantism, but also offers a deeper understanding of the local level actors driving the its occurrence. The results further our understanding of various forms of electoral violence and contribute to research on democratization. Taken together, this study suggests that states’ attempts at democratization can be explained, in part, by variation in sub-national level politics and actors whose effects aggregate to constitute national level outcomes.

Author

• Michael Yekple, Bowdoin College