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Jerry Rawlings’ Leadership, Media, Civil Society, Political Parties and Ghana’s Democratic Consolidation Process

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Jerry John Rawlings

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Abstract

According to Haggard & Kaufman (2016), Samuel Huntington (1983) coined one of the most widely recognized metaphors in recent social science when he argued we were living through a “Third Wave” of democratization. So pervasive was this that Fukuyama (1989) declared that society had witnessed the “end of history” and that liberal democracy had triumphed and was the ultimate ideology. However, Zakaria (1997) warned that democracies around the world were caving into illiberal reforms, and that the key elements and institutions that held the traditions of liberalism and democracy together were being eroded at an alarming pace. On the African continent, while most countries began to arrange multiparty elections in the 1990s, most incumbents managed to skew the electoral playing field in their favor to prevent equal competition, establishing competitive authoritarianism rather than electoral democracy (Wahman, 2014; Cho & Logan, 2014). Ghana can be said to be an exception to this trend of the reversal of democracy in Africa after it transitioned to democratic rule in 1992 under Jerry John (JJ) Rawlings. Since the introduction of constitutional rule, not only has Ghana been a relatively stable democracy, but also several peaceful, and competitive presidential and parliamentary elections, as well as the alternation in power between the two main political parties, New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC), have occurred. This chapter therefore examines the leadership and legacy of JJ Rawlings, perceived as playing an instrumental role in Ghana’s political fortunes by initiating political reforms in the early 1990s. A corollary objective is to understand how the media, civil society organizations (CSOs), and political parties are influencing the governance and democratic consolidation process in Ghana.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Brierley and Kramon (2020) note that incumbent abuses create an unlevel playing field at every stage of the electoral cycle through practices such as ruling parties using their position to amass wealth by diverting state funds into party coffers through the manipulation of state contracts and kickbacks, and using state resources to fund their campaigns through local government vehicles being used to transport supporters to rallies.

  2. 2.

    This article says that all international and economic transactions to which the Ghana government is party must be laid before parliament for approval before it can come into effect.

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  1. Department of Political Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

    Peter Arthur

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Correspondence to Peter Arthur .

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  1. Department of Africana Studies, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA

    Felix Kumah-Abiwu

  2. Department of History and Political Science, Alabama State University, Montgomery, AL, USA

    Sabella Ogbobode Abidde

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Arthur, P. (2022). Jerry Rawlings’ Leadership, Media, Civil Society, Political Parties and Ghana’s Democratic Consolidation Process. In: Kumah-Abiwu, F., Abidde, S.O. (eds) Jerry John Rawlings. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14667-1_14

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