Dr Anja Osei is a senior researcher at the University of Konstanz, Germany. She is the principal investigator of the EU-funded project “Do Legislatures Enhance Democracy in Africa? (DLEDA)” and specializes in African politics with a focus on democratization, electoral authoriatarianism and political institutions.
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.
Selected publications
2018. “Elite Theory and Political Transitions: Networks of Power in Ghana and Togo”. Comparative Politics 51(1): 21–42.
2018. “Like Father, like Son? Power and Influence across Two Gnassingbé Presidencies in Togo”. Democratization 25(8): 1460–80.2018.
with Thomas Malang. “Party, ethnicity, or region? Determinants of informal political exchange in the parliament of Ghana”, Party Politics, 24(4), 410–420.
2016. “Formal Party Organisation and Informal Relations in African Parties: Evidence from Ghana”, The Journal of Modern African Studies 54(1): 37-66.
2015. “Elites and Democracy in Ghana: A Social Network Approach”, African Affairs 114 (457): 529–54.
