633907

research-article2016
RAP0010.1177/2053168016633907Research & PoliticsAsunka

Research Article
Research and Politics

Partisanship and political accountability in January-March 2016: 1­–7

© The Author(s) 2016
DOI: 10.1177/2053168016633907
new democracies: Explaining compliance rap.sagepub.com

with formal rules and procedures in Ghana

Joseph Asunka

Abstract
Standard political agency models generally predict an inverse relationship between the degree of partisan allegiance
among citizens and political accountability. Does variation in voter attachments to political parties influence the behavior
of public officials in new democracies? I take advantage of data from a unique audit of local governments in Ghana—
the Functional Organizational Assessment Tool (FOAT)—to examine the impact of partisanship on public officials’
compliance with formal rules and procedures. Because unattached or weakly attached voters are more responsive to
the performance of incumbent officials, they are more likely to deter rent seeking, corruption, and other administrative
malpractices. Analysis of the baseline FOAT results provides strong support for this idea: compliance with formal rules
and procedures is significantly higher in districts where voters evince weak attachments to political parties. This result
is robust to controls for alternate explanations and sheds light on the conditions under which politicians would abjure
rent seeking and corruption, even in the context of a new democracy where they have so much opportunity to do so.

Keywords
Voter attachment, compliance, Ghana, local government

Introduction
Political parties are an important instrument and institution
of democratic politics. That modern representative democ-
racy is not conceivable without political parties is widely
accepted among researchers (Ladd, 1992). By articulating
and integrating different interests, visions, and opinions,
parties mobilize citizen engagement in the political process
with the ultimate goal of winning political power and influ-
encing government policy. While popular participation in
the political process is essential for democratic develop-
ment, research suggests that the degree of partisan attach-
ments among citizens has important implications for
political accountability and, hence, the proper functioning
of democracy and the overall welfare of citizens.
Standard political agency models generally predict
an inverse relationship between the degree of partisan
allegiances among citizens and political accountability
(Besley, 2007; Persson and Tabellini, 2000). When voters
grow strongly attached to and prioritize electoral victory of
their favorite parties over other considerations, electoral
control of politicians suffers. A large body of empirical
work in different contexts confirms this inverse relation-
ship. Strong partisanship reduces voter responsiveness to
politicians’ performance (Anderson, 2000; Hellwig and
Samuels, 2008; Kayser and Wlezien, 2011; Moehler and
Lindberg, 2009) and undermines their ability to remove
corrupt and nonperforming politicians from office (Eggers,
2014). From the politicians’ point of view, strong partisan-
ship reduces elected officials’ incentives to exert energy
toward providing quality basic services to their constitu-
ents (Keefer and Khemani, 2009). I extend this logic to
address an important but relatively underexplored question
in new democracies where formal rules and procedures
are less well institutionalized and politicians have signifi-
cant opportunity to manipulate the weaknesses in the
University of California, USA
Corresponding author:
Joseph Asunka, University of California, 4289 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles,
CA 90095, USA.
Email: asunka@ucla.edu

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2 Research and Politics 
accountability system and extract public resources for pri-
vate ends. I ask whether variation in voters’ partisan pref-
erences influences the behavior of public officials in these
contexts. In other words, does the inverse relationship
between partisanship and political accountability apply in
developing democracies?
Because the voting decisions of unattached or weakly
attached voters are increasingly influenced by the perfor-
mance of incumbent politicians in new democracies (Fridy,
2007; Lindberg and Morrison, 2008; Youde, 2005), the
theory would predict that these voting behaviors are likely
to deter official impropriety; incumbent politicians would
risk damaging their re-election chances and those of their
party if they engage in rent seeking, corruption, and other
administrative malpractices in contexts where partisan loy-
alties are weak. To test this idea empirically, I use a unique
and highly comparable baseline dataset from a standardized
assessment of the budget implementation activities of
local governments in Ghana. This on-going annual assess-
ment program, known as the Functional Organizational
Assessment Tool (FOAT), started in 2008 and is designed
to gauge the extent of local governments’ compliance with
the formal rules and administrative procedures governing
budget implementation. These rules and procedures, nota-
bly those contained in Ghana’s Financial Administration
and Public Procurement Acts (more below), are designed to
decrease the prevalence of rent seeking and corruption
among public officials. Thus, greater adherence to these
rules and procedures means less rent seeking and/or corrup-
tion. However, the formal institutional structure of local
government in Ghana (see overview below) makes local
politicians more accountable to the president and the ruling
national party and thus significantly weakens enforcement
of and accountability vis-à-vis the rules at the local level.
Even despite this single country-wide administrative
structure, however, the results of the baseline FOAT
assessment reveal wide variation in local governments’
compliance with rules and procedures. I argue that the
degree of partisan attachments among voters accounts for
this variation.
To measure the extent of voter attachments to political
parties in each local government district, I use two indica-
tors based on electoral outcomes in the two general elec-
tions preceding the baseline assessment in 2006 (i.e. the
2000 and 2004 general elections). Firstly, taking advantage
of Ghana’s concurrent presidential and legislative elec-
tions, I create a dichotomous variable that takes a value of
1 if the majority of voters in the district voted for the presi-
dential candidate of one party and the parliamentary candi-
date of a different party in one or both prior elections, and
0 otherwise. I call this split-ticket voting.1 Strongly attached
voters have an incentive to vote for the candidates of their
favorite parties in both the presidential and legislative elec-
tions. Thus, if the winning candidates in the (concurrent)
presidential and legislative elections in a district are from
different parties, that would be indicative of weaker parti-
san preferences among some voters in the district. Secondly,
to capture the effect of the magnitude of nonpartisan voters,
I use the Pedersen index of electoral volatility to compute
the proportion of voters that switched between the two par-
ties in each district in the two prior elections.2 For a stable
two-party system with consistently high voter turnout as in
Ghana, we would expect this measure to capture the rate of
voter switching between the two parties over time.
Consistent with the idea that weak partisanship deters
rent seeking and other corrupt practices, I find that compli-
ance with formal budget rules and administrative proce-
dures is significantly higher in districts where voters have
weaker attachments to political parties. The results suggest
that even in contexts where formal institutional constraints
are limited and politicians have the greatest opportunity to
manipulate or override the existing rules and procedures for
personal gain, weak partisan loyalties can constrain the
incentive to exploit those opportunities. This paper contrib-
utes to the broader literature about the relationship between
partisanship and political accountability by focusing on the
effect of partisan loyalties on rent seeking behavior among
public officials in new democracies with fledgling institu-
tions. The paper also contributes to the literature on how
competitive configurations create incentives for politicians
to tie their own hands through administrative reforms
(Finkel, 2008; Geddes, 1991; Lehoucq and Molina, 2002).
Finally, the evidence presented here is consistent with
recent research that shows a rising trend of performance-
based voting in Africa (Bratton, 2013; Fridy, 2007; Lindberg
and Morrison, 2008; Youde, 2005), a trend that is largely
concentrated among unattached or weakly attached voters
(Weghorst and Lindberg, 2013).3
Empirical setting
Ghana is a unitary state divided into 10 administrative
regions. The principal units of local government are the
districts, of which there are presently 216 nested within
the 10 regions. This is the level of government at which
the national budget is allocated and spent. The political
heads of local government are known as District Chief
Executives (DCEs)—the equivalent of city mayors else-
where. The president appoints all the DCEs and they have
significant authority over all spending decisions in their
districts. The administrative setup of local government
means that the president and the governing national party
have broad, centralized control over the affairs of all dis-
tricts in the country.
As the main agents of development at the local level,
local governments, specifically the DCEs, control large
amounts of financial and other development resources. To
check abuse or misappropriation of public resources, Ghana
has, since its transition to democracy in 1992, introduced
various laws to govern development policy implementation
Asunka 3
at all levels of government, including, in particular, local
governments. These laws, in particular the Financial
Administration Act and the Public Procurement Act, both
enacted in 2003, are designed to prevent rent seeking and
corruption among public officials. In addition to these two
pieces of legislation, there are many other formal guide-
lines and administrative procedures for administering the
numerous development resources that flow to the districts.
However, the sweeping appointment powers of the presi-
dent significantly weaken local-level accountability and
enforcement of the formal rules and procedures. Thus, local
officials have significant opportunity to manipulate or
override the existing rules and procedures and extract pub-
lic resources for political or private ends with little or no
legal sanction.
The apparent weak enforcement of the rules and pro-
cedures and, hence, widespread rent seeking and corrupt
practices at the level of local government partly prompted
the introduction of the independent assessment program
in 2008. Four of Ghana’s major bilateral donors partnered
with the government to introduce the FOAT program to
assess all local governments annually on their compli-
ance with budget rules and administrative procedures, to
motivate compliance with the established rules proce-
dures, and to eliminate official malfeasance.4 The pro-
gram’s accountability indicators are divided into two
groups: minimum conditions (MCs) and performance
measures (PMs). The PMs, the focus in this paper, are the
dimensions used to assess local governments’ compli-
ance with the existing formal rules and procedures gov-
erning implementation of the national budget in nine
broad areas.5
Although the program was introduced in 2008, the
baseline assessment was conducted on the 2006 fiscal
year activities. I use the results of the baseline assessment
for the analysis in this paper. The baseline results are
ideal for investigating the political sources of the varia-
tion in compliance with formal rules and procedures for
at least two reasons. Firstly, the 2006 baseline assessment
was akin to a surprise audit of the behavior of local offi-
cials in the budget implementation phase. The 2006 fiscal
year activities were executed without any knowledge of a
possible assessment in the future and, hence, local offi-
cials would have conducted their activities on the basis of
business-as-usual. This should be contrasted with the
standard annual audits of local governments conducted
by the auditor general, which local officials are very
much aware of and often take steps to ensure that they get
favorable audit opinions. We can imagine that corrupt
officials are capable of buying the best audit opinions in
the circumstance.6 Secondly, the FOAT program came
with an incentive package: districts that do well in com-
plying with the rules are rewarded with extra discretion-
ary funding. This monetary incentive, which became
apparent only in 2008, now complicates the behavior of
local officials and thus makes subsequent FOAT results
less ideal for investigating the political sources of official
compliance with rules and procedures. In fact, all the dis-
tricts have become “masters of the game” over time; in
recent assessments, the scores on all the FOAT PMs are
so high that there is very little cross-district variation to
make any meaningful analysis.
Data and measurement
In 2006, the baseline year of the FOAT assessment, Ghana
had a total of 138 districts and all were assessed and hence
are included in the analysis below.
Dependent variables
Compliance with formal rules and administrative
procedures
I operationalize the dependent variable in two ways: first
I use the total compliance score on all the eight FOAT
PMs used for the baseline assessment. The ninth PM—
Environmental Sanitation Management—was introduced
in subsequent assessments. The total score on all PMs is
100. Secondly, I use the compliance score on procure-
ment alone. The procurement PM gauges local govern-
ments’ compliance with the formal rules governing
contracting and contract execution and includes indica-
tors such as procedures for inviting tenders, contract
mobilization, tender review process, timeliness of pro-
jects execution, and contract retention. The maximum
score on this measure is 9. I single out procurement for
two reasons: firstly, studies on Ghana’s national budget
show that more than half—between 50 and 70 percent—
is procurement-related (World Bank, 2003). Since much
of government spending goes into procurement, rent
seeking and corruption is likely to be concentrated in this
area. Secondly, procurement is an activity that is most
susceptible to rent seeking behavior and corruption: offi-
cials can bend the rules of contracting and pricing of
goods and services. If local officials seek to extract pri-
vate benefits, they would most likely do so through
procurement.7
Control variables
I control for several socio-economic and demographic
characteristics of the districts. Firstly, I control for
Education, as well-educated voters may demand more effi-
cient management and use of public resources and may be
more likely to punish politicians who behave otherwise. I
operationalize this concept using the share of district popu-
lation that has at least a high school education. Secondly, I
control for ethnic diversity, arguably the most important
factor in African elections (Posner, 2007). Ghana’s 2000
4 Research and Politics 

Table 1.  Split-ticket voting and local governments’ compliance with formal rules and administrative procedures in Ghana.

VARIABLES Dependent variable: Total FOAT Dependent variable: Procurement

score (Range: 0–100) score (Range: 0–9)

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4

Split ticket 5.547*** 3.413** 0.911*** 0.570**
  (1.561) (1.470) (0.283) (0.266)
Ethnic fractionalization 14.503*** 2.971***
  (3.453) (0.624)
Percent over high school −6.575 −2.335
  (13.993) (2.529)
Bureaucratic capacity 1.199** −0.061
  (0.484) (0.087)
Pop density (logged) 4.858** 1.070***
  (1.864) (0.337)
Average turnout −4.878 2.151
  (13.966) (2.524)
Constant 42.831*** 24.778** 5.528*** 0.982
  (1.753) (11.568) (0.318) (2.091)
Region fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Observations 138 138 138 138
R-squared 0.210 0.381 0.133 0.324

Standard errors in parentheses.

***p < 0.01; **p < 0.05; *p < 0.1.
FOAT: Functional Organizational Assessment Tool.

population and housing census includes a breakdown of Results

the ethnic composition of the population in each district. I
use this data to compute an index of ethno-linguistic frac-
tionalization (ELF), which is a decreasing transformation
of the Herfindahl concentration index.8 Thirdly, I control
for bureaucratic capacity, as districts with greater bureau-
cratic capacity may just do better at following the formal
rules and procedures than those with limited capacity. I
use a measure of per capita locally generated revenues
from the FOAT results to measure bureaucratic capacity.
Fourthly, I control for population density (logged) as a
proxy for urbanization. Finally, I control for voter turnout
in each district in the 2004 presidential elections. Turnout
in national elections has been shown elsewhere to influ-
ence the behavior of incumbent politicians (Fleck, 1999;
Horiuchi and Saito, 2009).
Empirical model
I estimate a simple ordinary least squares (OLS) model that
takes the form below and includes region fixed effects in all
specifications, since the districts are nested within the 10
regions
Compliancei = b0 + b1 Attached i + b2 Ethnic.Fraci
+ b3 Educationi + b4 Bureau.Capacityi
+ b5log ( Pop. Densityi ) + b6Turnouti + ε i
Table 1 presents the OLS regression results of the effect of
split-ticket voting on local governments’ compliance with
formal rules and administrative procedures. The dependent
variable in columns 1 and 2 is the total score on all the eight
PMs; that in columns 3 and 4 is the compliance score on
procurement only. Columns 1 and 3 report estimates of the
effect of split-ticket voting on total compliance and pro-
curement compliance scores respectively without any
covariates. In both models, the effect is statistically signifi-
cant. Without accounting for any covariates, the results
show that on average, the total compliance score on all PMs
is about six points higher in districts that voted for candi-
dates of different parties in at least one of the two prior
general elections compared to those that voted straight
ticket in those elections. Similarly, split-ticket districts
score about one point higher on procurement compliance
than straight ticket districts.
In columns 2 and 4, I control for all the relevant covari-
ates as well as region fixed effects. In both models, the
effect of split-ticket voting remains positive and statisti-
cally significant. Local governments in districts that have
experienced split- ticket voting in prior elections are sig-
nificantly more likely to stick to the formal rules and
administrative procedures governing development policy
implementation. In these districts, the total score on all
eight compliance indicators is about four points higher
Asunka 5

Table 2.  Electoral volatility and local governments’ compliance with formal rules and administrative procedures in Ghana.

VARIABLES Dependent variable: Total FOAT Dependent variable: Procurement

score (Range: 0–100) score (Range: 0–9)

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4

Index of electoral volatility 0.485** 0.347** 0.105*** 0.078**
  (0.189) (0.173) (0.035) (0.032)
Ethnic fractionalization 14.152*** 3.213***
  (3.436) (0.633)
Percent over high school −10.465 −2.056
  (13.803) (2.542)
Bureaucratic capacity 1.379*** −0.034
  (0.474) (0.087)
Pop density (logged) 4.918*** 0.996***
  (1.829) (0.337)
Average turnout 1.403 4.736*
  (14.715) (2.710)
Constant 41.113*** 18.004 5.144*** −1.481
  (1.878) (12.181) (0.350) (2.243)
Region fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Observations 130 130 130 130
R-squared 0.216 0.405 0.120 0.347

Standard errors in parentheses.

***p < 0.01; **p < 0.05; *p < 0.1.
FOAT: Functional Organizational Assessment Tool.

compared to districts that voted straight ticket in the two
prior elections. These effects are quite large given the
design of the indicators. Most of the indicators are dichoto-
mous—taking a value of 1 if the district fulfils a particular
formal rule or administrative procedure and 0 otherwise.
This means that on average, split-ticket districts comply
with about four more formal rules and/or administrative
procedures than straight ticket district. The results on pro-
curement are similar. Districts with a history of split-ticket
voting score, on average, about half a point higher on pro-
curement compliance than those with no such experience.
This translates approximately to compliance with one more
procurement rule or procedure.
Alternative specifications of main
independent variable
Table 2 presents the results using the second operationaliza-
tion of voter attachments to political parties: the Pedersen
index of electoral volatility. Similar to the preceding analy-
sis, I find that higher voter volatility is associated with
greater compliance with formal rules and procedures. Based
on the results in models 2 and 4, a 10 percentage-point
switch between the two parties, which is just around the
average, is associated with about a 4-point increase in the
total FOAT score (i.e. compliance with roughly four more
formal rules and procedures) and about 1 point increase
in the procurement compliance score (i.e. compliance
with approximately two more rules and procedures on
procurement).9 Since each rule or procedure is designed to
prevent rent seeking behavior and corruption in specific
areas, the results suggest that officials in electorally volatile
districts are relatively more likely to constrain their own
ability to extract private rents.10
The other important determinants of public officials’
compliance with formal rules and procedures are ethnic
diversity and population density. Both variables are statisti-
cally significant in all specifications, suggesting that local
governments in ethnically heterogeneous and densely popu-
lated districts are more likely to stick to the rules and thus
relatively less likely to engage in rent seeking and corrup-
tion. Firstly, the effect of ethnicity is to be expected given
the nature of Ghana’s ethnic geography. The two ethnic
groups that identify strongly with, and consistently vote
straight ticket for candidates of the two major parties in both
the presidential and legislative elections, are concentrated in
only two of the 10 regions. Voting behavior in the remaining
eight regions, which are relatively more ethnically diverse,
is driven by factors other than ethnicity (Fridy, 2007). High
ethnic diversity means that no single ethnic group can mobi-
lize and win an election on its own and the performance of
incumbents would matter in those settings. Secondly,
densely populated areas, which are essentially the urban
areas, are home to relatively wealthier and perhaps better-
informed voters. Economically empowered voters are more
likely to demand efficient management and use of public
resources and they may punish incumbent politicians
who engage in rent seeking and corruption. This result is
6 Research and Politics 
consistent with studies that show that politicians are more  
likely to engage in clientelism and other corrupt electoral
practices among the poor (e.g. Magaloni et al., 2007;
Wantchekon, 2003) and thus less likely to do so in wealthy
areas (Weitz-Shapiro, 2012).
Conclusion
This paper examines the impact of voter attachment to
political parties on public officials’ compliance with formal
rules and administrative procedures designed to eliminate
or reduce opportunities for rent seeking and corruption. The
evidence shows that compliance with formal rules and pro-
cedures is significantly higher in districts where voters
demonstrate weak commitments to political parties.
Because unattached or weakly attached voters are more
responsive to the performance of incumbent officials, poli-
ticians in these districts risk undermining their own politi-
cal futures if they exploit public resources for immediate  
personal gain. This association is robust to controls for a
range of potential confounding covariates, including fac-
tors unique to each region. These findings thus advance our  
understanding of the conditions under which politicians
would play by the rules and potentially limit their ability to
extract private rents. Using the case of Ghana, where the
formal legal system is relatively weakly institutionalized,
has allowed insight in particular into a context where politi-
cians have significant opportunity to engage in corruption,
given the relatively low chance of legal sanction. The
results suggest that when voters are less committed to polit-
 
ical parties, rent seeking behavior and other administrative
malpractices are likely to decline.
 
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support
for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article:
UCLA dissertation year fellowship; UCLA International Institute;  
and UCLA Charles and Sue Young Fellowship.
Notes
 1. This is usually referred to as “skirt and blouse voting” in
 
Ghana.
 2. For each district, I compute electoral volatility using the
results of the two presidential elections that preceded the
10. An additional analysis using the 2005 Afrobarometer opin-
2006 fiscal year. These were the elections of 2000 and 2004.
∑ survey, the Afrobarometer asks respondents whether they
n
pit − pi(t +1)
Volatility = i =1 where p is the vote share
2 it
of party i in election t.
This index takes values between 0.485 and 23.62 percent,
with a mean of 6.25 and standard deviation of 4.28 percent.
3. It is necessary that I touch on the role of ethnicity, which
is arguably the most important factor in the political life of
Africa (Carlson, 2010; Ferree, 2006; Ichino and Nathan,
2013; Kanyinga, 1994; Posner, 2005, 2007). It is possible
that patterns of partisan attachments are shaped by ethnic
identities and potentially the results presented in this paper.
Although ethnicity plays an important role in voting behav-
ior in Africa, recent research suggests that elections are
more than just ethnic censuses (Bratton, 2013; Lindberg and
Morrison, 2008). Increasingly, many voters in the region
base their voting decisions on the performance of incumbent
politicians (Lindberg and Morrison, 2005). More importantly
in the case of Ghana, the relationship between ethnicity and
partisan affinities is very weak. The ethnic groups that iden-
tify strongly with, and vote en bloc for the two major par-
ties, are concentrated in only two of Ghana’s 10 regions. The
vast majority of voters in the remaining eight regions, who
usually determine the outcome of national elections, vote on
issues other than ethnic identities (Fridy, 2007).
4. The four donors are the French Development Agency, the
Canadian International Development Agency, the Danish
International Development Agency, and the German
Development Bank.
5. The nine PMs are as follows: (1) “Management and
Organization”; (2) “Transparency, Openness and
Accountability”; (3) “Planning System”; (4) “Human
Resource Management”; (5) “Relations with substruc-
tures”; (6) “Financial Management and Auditing”;
(7) “Fiscal Capacity”; (8) “Procurement”; and (9)
“Environmental Sanitation and Management”. The
baseline assessment did not include the measure on
Environmental Sanitation and Management.
6. This is why audit results may be less helpful for evaluating
the behavior of local politicians.
7. To provide a more complete picture, I run the same analysis
for each of the remaining PMs and graph the main effects.
The results are presented in Figure A1 and Figure A2 in the
online appendix. The results show that higher electoral vola-
tility is associated with greater compliance with the formal
rules and procedures governing financial management and
planning. I find no effect on the other PMs. I also find no
effect on the individual PMs using the dichotomous version
of my measure of voter attachment to parties.
8. If a district is composed of K ⩾ 2 ethnic groups and pk
denotes the share of group k in the population, then the
Ethno-Linguistic Fractionalization (ELF) is computed as
K
follows: ELF = 1 −
∑p 2
k
.
k =1
9. It is important to note here that a 10-percentage point switch
between the two major parties is not extraordinary in Ghana.
In fact it is quite common.
ion survey data for Ghana yields very similar results. In each
feel close to any party. For each district that was included
in the 2005 survey, I compute the proportion of voters who
report that they do not feel close to any party as a meas-
ure of the degree of voter attachments to political parties.
The results, presented in Table A1 in the online appendix,
show that compliance with formal rules and administrative
Asunka 7
procedures is significantly higher in districts with larger
concentrations of voters who report that they do not feel
close to any political party.
Supplementary material
The online appendix is available at: http://rap.sagepub.com/
content/3/1
Carnegie Corporation of New York Grant
The open access article processing charge (APC) for this article
was waived due to a grant awarded to Research & Politics from
Carnegie Corporation of New York under its ‘Bridging the Gap’
initiative.
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