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Electrifying the base? Aid and incumbent advantage in Ghana*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2012

Ryan C. Briggs
Ryan C. Briggs*
Affiliation:
School of International Service, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20016, USA
*
Email: ryan.briggs@american.edu
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Abstract

In 1999, the year before Ghana's 2000 election, the country experienced a large, unexpected decline in aid. The incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC) lost the election. Did the decline in aid hurt the NDC at the polls, or was it simply incidental? Using data from a national, World Bank-funded electrification project, this article shows that the NDC was able to allocate aid according to explicitly political criteria. The article also exploits a quasi-experiment in aid disbursements to show that electrification caused NDC voting to increase in the constituencies that received electrification. Pre-electoral aid fluctuations exert a modest but measurable force on voting patterns. These findings add weight to calls for donors to coordinate to reduce aid volatility. They also show that incumbent governments can allocate aid strategically to secure votes, even under the best-case scenario of strict donor monitoring in an established democracy.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 603 - 624
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Deborah Bräutigam, Barak Hoffman, Carl LeVan, Emmanuel Gyimah-Boadi, Maya Berinzon, Tom Long, Tony Killick and participants at the International Studies Association meeting in San Diego for comments, suggestions and discussion. I would also like to thank Kevin Fridy, Afua Branoah Banful and the Ghanaian Statistical Service for sharing data. I am grateful to American University and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council for providing funding. Any errors are my own.

References

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