Power, Patronage, and the Local State in Ghana

Barry Driscoll (he/him/his) is an associate professor at Grinnell College. His article "Big Man or Boogey Man? The Concept of the Big Man in Africanist Political Science" was published in the Journal of Modern African Studies and his research and teaching interests center on states in the political economy of development, especially local governance, taxation, political parties, clientelism, and state capacity.

Introduction: The Local State in the Twenty-First Century 1 Why Some Districts Are Competitive: The Order of Local State Formation 2 Why Some Districts Fear Their Party Activists 3 Why (and How) Some Party Activists Get Patronage 4 Beyond Case Studies: Countrywide Analysis 5 Why Patronage and State Capacity Can Coexist 6 Some Comparative Perspective

"Consistently insightful, clear yet nuanced, thought-provoking from the first page onwards, and engagingly written for a wider audience, this is one of the best books written on political parties in Africa in the last decade." - Nic Cheeseman, author of Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures, and the Struggle for Political Reform "Barry Driscoll's close-up, empirically meticulous study of clientelism in Ghana challenges a great deal of widely shared received wisdom on political linkages in electoral democracies. He shows that intense inter-party competition may actually magnify rather than reduce clientelistic allocation of benefits and that some variants of greater state capacity are quite compatible with extensive clientelism, if not facilitating it. The persuasiveness of Driscoll's investigation follows from a research strategy that operates at three levels. It combines, first, thick description of local transactional practices based on personal observation in select administrative districts with, second, quantitative analysis of subnational linkage patterns across all of Ghana and, third, situating the Ghanaian experience of political linkage mechanisms in a broad regional comparative examination. Driscoll's inquiry is thought provoking and should be required reading for any scholar venturing to contribute to the field of democratic linkage studies." - Herbert Kitschelt, coauthor of Patrons, Clients and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition The book's six chapters make a significant scholarly contribution by unpacking how political parties navigate the relationship between local state actors and lower-level factions within a political party. (Journal of Development Studies) Barry Driscoll's book is an empirically grounded masterpiece. - Adeniyi S. Basiru (African Studies Quarterly)