The Allocation of Public Goods and National Elections in Ghana

Pierre André () and Sandrine Mesplé-Somps

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The body of literature on purely democratic countries can sometimes fail to explain the behavior of government in semi-democratic African countries. Empirical and theoretical political economic papers find that public funds target ruling party supporters and swing districts. Our results, however, suggest that the opposite was true of Ghana. We observe that pro-government districts received less public investment when the NDC was in power. We posit that this finding is partially driven by the government's will to curry favor with opposition politicians. Indeed, in addition to pursuing its electoral objectives, the government of an emerging democracy may fear political instability and keep the lid on potential unrest by bargaining with opposition leaders. Our analysis also shows that, when controlling for votes and other covariates (including wealth, urbanization and density), public goods allocation is not driven by ethnic group targeting either.

Keywords: Public goods; elections; ethnic; Africa; Ghana (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 O1 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-cdm, nep-pbe and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:29873

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