With the increasing consolidation of her democracy, Ghana has, once again, become a cause for celebration and a source of pride in Africa. This newfound status as the bellwether state of African democracy makes Ghana ripe for a critical analysis of her democratic institutions. This article places the handling of parliamentary primaries by the two leading political parties in Ghana – the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) – under the microscope for closer scrutiny. The article interrogates the nature of these primaries, the procedures that govern their conduct, the factors that determine whether or not they are held, and the extent to which these parliamentary primaries have satisfied or deviated from democratic norms. It concludes that, while tremendous progress has been made in the candidate selection process by both major parties, there is plenty of room for improvement to ensure that the process is sufficiently empowering of voters in the constituencies and, hence, genuinely democratic.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.