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Ideally, citizens should be able to focus their lowest cost resource – voting – on choosing representatives who will fight most of their battles and protect most of their interests. They may join associations that fight other battles. In both cases, citizens judge whether their interests align closely enough with their representatives – whether formally elected or informally selected – that they can trust them as political Proxies (Warren, 1996, 2000). Electoral participation is widely believed to be an important indicator of the health and vitality of democracy. And statistics on voter turnout, the extent to which those entitled to vote do so, are often used to shed light on how representative governments are of the electorate. It has been argued that a healthy democracy needs citizens who care, are willing to take part, and are capable of helping to shape the common agenda of a society. And so participation - whether through the institutions of civil society, political parties, or the act of voting - is seen as important to a stable democracy. There is a widespread belief that participation in political life is good for the workings of democracy and so low turnout might represent a weak democratic system. The beauty of liberal democracy is that it is the only egalitarian system in which all the eligible citizens are given an equal right of one vote to participate in the political system; irrespective of one’s background and status in society. Morris P. Fiorina, an American political scientist describes “democratic voting as the fundamental political act”. A defining feature of any democratic system is that decision-makers are under the “effective popular control of the people they are meant to govern ” (Mayo, 1960: 60). There are serious implications if voter turnout is low in any established democracy. The main repercussion is that the leaders elected and the interests they stand for are determined by a few numbers of people in the political community. System legitimacy becomes shaky, uncertain and 代写留学作业提供代写Essay，代写Assignment，请联系QQ：949925041necessarily doubtful if few people vote. Understanding the driving forces behind what appears to be a persistent low voter turnout in the district assembly elections is of obvious importance. I must explicitly say that I am not the first person to conduct research on Local Government in Ghana. Although significant research studies have been done on decentralization and local governance in Ghana, very little literature exists on the elections of local level officials, and there is virtually no literature on the voter turnout in the local level elections. Therefore, a study like mine may provide us with the needed facts to enable us to ascertain the underlying factors behind the voter apathy which had characterised the district assembly elections since its inception in1988 to the last elections in 2006 in order to appreciate the dynamics of electoral participation in decentralization and democratic local governance in Ghana. |
