![cineplay power politics 1992 cineplay power politics 1992](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/games.snapshot/6235/121911-PowerPolitics.jpg)
I recognize that elections do not, in and of themselves, constitute a consolidated democracy.
![cineplay power politics 1992 cineplay power politics 1992](https://assets.mubi.com/images/film/78755/image-w448.jpg)
I hold a middle view in this debate: while seeking to avoid the electoral fallacy, I try not to commit its antithesis - what Seligson and Booth call the "anti-electoralist fallacy" -by assuming that elections never matter for democratization. Against such an approach, Terry Karl has raised the specter of a "fallacy of electoralism." As experience with "illiberal" democracies shows, elections can coexist with systematic abuses of political rights and the disenfranchisement of much of the population.
![cineplay power politics 1992 cineplay power politics 1992](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/games.snapshot/6235/121912-PowerPolitics.jpg)
Huntington, use electoral criteria for measuring consolidation: the so-called two-turnover test. But analysts do not agree on the role that elections play in the consolidation of democracy. Elections - which empower ordinary citizens to choose among contestants for top political office - clearly promote both sorts of rules. The consolidation of democracy involves the widespread acceptance of rules to guarantee political participation and political competition. Less glamorous than the landmark contests that gave birth to democracy, these events nevertheless held out the possibility that democratic routines might be deepened. Meanwhile, in countries that had experienced early regime change, expiring electoral cycles gave rise to a groundswell of "second" elections. Although founding elections continued to be conducted in African countries that were latecomers to the political-reform bandwagon, they took place less frequently than earlier in the decade. By the middle of the 1990s, this wave had crested. These contests can be described as "founding" elections in the sense that they marked for various countries a transition from an extended period of authoritarian rule to fledgling democratic government. The early 1990s saw a wave of competitive multiparty elections in Africa. This seems to suggest a dilemma in newly democratizing poor countries: while high-level competition is generally thought to be a desirable characteristic of a democratic regime, competition may also work to raise the frequency of political corruption. We also found in the Ghanaian case that as expected clientelism is more likely where political competition is high. This leads us to hypothesize that citizens in "transitional democracies" often reason and behave as relatively "mature" democratic voters by consciously appraising the past performance of the promised policy programs of candidates and parties. Despite the significance of ethnicity among elites in Africa, voters are seemingly not influenced primarily by it. Based on a survey of voters in two recent elections in Ghana, one of the most surprising findings is that an overwhelming majority of the respondents do not vote based on clientelism, or due to ethnic or family ties but cast their ballots after evaluation of candidates and parties. Recognizing that much of the literature assumes African political behavior to be subsumed in ethnic ties and clientelism, we ask if individual voting behavior in Africa is driven by evaluative rationales based on retrospective or prospective judgments of the performance of parties or representatives, or by non-evaluative rationales characterized by clientelism and proxy voting. This article explores voting behavior in one of Africa's new democracies.