Election Integrity and the Responsiveness of Politicians

Thursday, May 26, 2016
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
(Pacific)

Abstract:

Do cleaner elections lead to more responsive politicians? In many developing countries, domestic and international organizations take various initiatives to make elections cleaner. These efforts are anchored in the hope that cleaner elections will strengthen the control that citizens have over their elected representatives and ensure that politicians are responsive to their constituents’ desires. Scholars are, however, yet to show empirically that election quality positively affects the behavior of politicians. I provide a novel experimental approach to test the impact of cleaner elections on the responsiveness of Members of Parliament (MPs) in Ghana, a consolidating democracy in West Africa. Preliminary results show that MPs elected in cleaner elections provide more local public goods and constituency services but do not perform any better in their parliamentary attendance.

 

Speaker Bio:

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ofosu head photo
George Ofosu is a Pre-doctoral Fellow at CDDRL at Stanford. He is also a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. George specializes in Comparative Politics and Political Methodology. His research focuses on electoral fraud, the effects of domestic election monitoring, electoral accountability, research design, and the political economy of development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Ofosu's dissertation interrogates the impact of democratic elections on the responsiveness of politicians in developing countries, focusing on the case of Ghana's Members of Parliament. His dissertation has received funding from UCLA's International Institute.