Strategizing for quality elections in Africa: party capacity and the politics of vigilance in Ghana

Abstract

In 2016, Ghana’s New Patriotic Party (NPP) adopted innovative anti-rigging strategies as part of its successful campaign to defeat its main rival. This electoral vigilance system included a nationwide deployment of party agents, digitized parallel tabulation of results, and novel fundraising schemes. The move has been recognized in media and scholarly discussions. However, we still lack a deeper understanding of the NPP’s strategy and the conditions that enabled the party to implement it successfully. Analysing the key logistical, organizational, and procedural aspects of the NPP’s efforts, I argue that electoral vigilance can best be understood as a bundle of tactics that must be adopted and implemented simultaneously on a large scale to have substantive democratic impacts. The NPP honed and fully deployed its already extensive organizational capacities to support its vigilance interventions. This suggests that only parties with established bureaucratic structures, large membership, and professionalized staff, among other features, can translate their existing organizational resources into effective electoral vigilance interventions. Moreover, the NPP’s efforts worked because Ghana’s democratic environment supported these attempts to improve electoral quality. This shows that effective strategizing against manipulation is a product of organizationally complex parties operating in favourable political settings.