Dr Gbensuglo Alidu Bukari is a political economist and lecturer in politics and governance at the Department of Politics and Governance, University for Development Studies. His areas of research span the fields of political economy, democratic studies and development studies. His research interests include political economy, political economy of elections, political economy of development, political economy of governance, democracy, elections and politics.
MIASA Project: Candidate Selection in Ghana: An Experimental Study of Delegates’ Preferences in Party Primaries
Our project with the title “Candidate Selection in Ghana: An Experimental Study of Delegates’ Preferences in Party Primaries” is a political science project that studies the choice of parliamentary candidates in primary elections at the party level. The main research question is: What determines party delegates’ voting preferences in primary elections? The few existing studies on this topic suggest that vote-buying and patronage are prevalent in the African context. However, there is also some reason to believe that a candidates’ track record in taking care of the community, his or her social status, connections to power brokers like chiefs, or descriptive criteria like ethnicity, religion, or gender play a role. Moreover, internal factional rivalries often play out at the local level. To provide a first answer to the relative importance of these different factors, we will design an experimental survey that allows us to assess the preferences of party delegates.
