Parliamentary primaries in Ghana’s National Democratic Congress: Explaining reforms to candidate selection and their impact

Abstract

Candidate selection procedures play a crucial role in shaping parliaments and influence the quality of democracy. Yet our understanding of how and why political parties reform their candidate selection mechanisms over time is surprisingly limited – especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where a number of parties have begun to shift towards more inclusive procedures. To address this gap, we examine the experience of Ghana’s National Democratic Congress, which reformed its selection procedures in 2015 allowing all party members to vote in primary elections for its parliamentary candidates. We identify four motivations that drove these reforms: making the party more democratic by expanding participation, reducing the cost of the primary process, building the organizational capacity of the party, and keeping up with the party’s main competitor. Each motivation mattered more to some within the party than others; almost all ended up disappointed due to a substantial divergence between actual and intended effects that ultimately led to the reversion of the reforms in 2019. Our findings leave us better placed to understand both why political parties in sub-Saharan Africa’s more democratic regimes have shifted towards more inclusive candidate selection mechanisms over time, and why the pace of that change has been slow and uneven.