External actors, local participation, and political reform in Africa: Ghana and Senegal compared

This dissertation is about politics, power, and change in West Africa. Three questions are investigated: (1) how and to what extent does local participation transform the original patterns of donor-state relations and other kinds of political coalitions that support or hinder political and economic reforms?; (2) what does this suggest about the role of donor-mandated local participation in generating institutional change that is legitimate and sustainable?; and more generally, (3) to what extent can this local participation contribute to the wider efforts of resurgent civic society in Africa to improve governance? To investigate these questions, a relevant and contemporary example of political reform in Ghana and Senegal has been considered: the creation and development of domestic election-monitoring regimes. Specifically, then (a) what explains relative success of election monitoring reforms in Ghana, as compared with Senegal, in spite of the comparability of the programs initiated by external actors?, and (b) how did the forms of local participation differ across the two cases in terms of their origins and their impact on donor-state relations and coalitions supporting or hindering electoral reform? This dissertation is about political participation through, around, and between elections, which, when viewed through a longer and updated trajectory, matter differently because political participation has taken on new qualities and scale. Elections are treated differently because considering elections and the activity around them allows for a historical consideration of political trajectories of a given resurgent society and their influence on attempted democratization and economic growth. Due to what is happening through new actors in a fresh nexus within state-society relations, a key finding is that there is more vibrancy in the processes of political and economic transformation in Ghana than in Senegal. These new actors are creating organizations and networks that are bigger, more active, more interconnected, more process-focused, and have greater capacity, and that they are therefore more effective in fostering democracy and development. Ghana is more successful in the institutionalization of its domestic election monitoring regime, and there is a greater positive impact on both democracy and development than in Senegal