This study examines economic components of the support base for each party in Ghana’s de facto two-party system. Most accounts of partisan voting in African democracies contend that some voters routinely support the same party because it rewards co-ethnics through patronage in the form of private and local community goods. A few recent studies have found that some voters vote retrospectively and sociotropically, rewarding or punishing the incumbent party on the basis of its overall performance in office. However, neither the ethno-clientelist account nor the performance assessment account addresses the possibility that African parties build their support bases around competing economic policy interests. Using a merged dataset from the Afrobarometer Survey Round 5 and district-level industrial employment and agricultural production data from Ghana, I find that it is economic interests by agricultural sub-sector that are highly predictive of parties’ issue-based platforms. Voters who do not share a common interest with any of the main parties’ key policies are most likely to switch party preferences election to election.

中文翻译：

---

基于部门的投票选择：一种解释非洲核心选民和摇摆选民的新方法

本研究考察了加纳事实上的两党制中每个政党的支持基础的经济组成部分。大多数关于非洲民主国家党派投票的说法都认为，一些选民通常支持同一政党，因为它通过以私人和当地社区商品的形式提供赞助来奖励同族裔。最近的一些研究发现，一些选民会根据现任党在任期间的整体表现进行回顾性和社会性的投票，奖励或惩罚现任党。然而，无论是民族客户账户还是绩效评估账户都没有解决非洲各方围绕相互竞争的经济政策利益建立支持基础的可能性。使用来自第 5 轮非洲晴雨表调查的合并数据集和来自加纳的地区级工业就业和农业生产数据，我发现农业子行业的经济利益对各方基于问题的平台具有高度预测性。与任何主要政党的关键政策没有共同利益的选民最有可能将政党偏好转换为选举。