Who Votes with the Chief? Evaluating Traditional Authority in Ghana and Togo

• In Event: The State and Traditional Governance Nexus: Empirical Evidence from Africa

Abstract

Recent scholarship has examined the role that traditional authorities play as vote brokers in African democracies, arguing that chiefs can enhance democratic responsiveness (Baldwin 2015). This paper probes this recent interest in the political role of the chieftaincy by situating traditional authorities’ roles as vote-brokers in the broader context of how they relate to their communities. Specifically, we are interested in what conditions enable chiefs to serve as more credible vote brokers and whether this compliments or comes at a cost to other roles they play in their communities.

To do so, we look at villages straddling the Ghana-Togo border, using large-N survey data with citizens and in-depth qualitative interviews with village chiefs to examine how chiefly authority is exercised within villages today. Because of their geographic proximity, village pairs on either side of the border should ostensibly have had similar precolonial norms of authority, further allowing us to contextualize the role of the colonial and postcolonial state. Employing this cross-national and village-level variation, this paper broadens our understanding of the role chiefs play as political intermediaries in West Africa by linking their political roles to those they play as social regulators within their villages.

Authors

• Martha Wilfahrt, University of California, Berkeley

• Natalie Wenzell Letsa, University of Oklahoma