The New Electoral Marketplace and Voting: Conceptual and Empirical Insights

This paper sets out to ascertain new electoral market for votes in the emerging democracies. It builds on earlier studies that tried howbeit in a limited way to explain the activities of political parties’ in African elections by extending the analysis to party identity, party branding and voting interface in Ghana. It interrogates the question: how does political brand identity influence voting behaviour? Drawing on in-depth interviews data and multiple strands of documentary analysis, it was established that political party identity and branding have little considerable influence on voting choices in Ghanaian elections. The results, show very little evidence to conceptually and empirically support the claim that party identity and branding have the propensity to influence voter choice from the perspective of the study participants. Based on the results, the paper concludes that voting behaviour in Ghana vary with policy choices, and more associated with mounting electoral-economic disequilibrium, given socio-economic constraints such as fluctuations in the market price of goods and services. Therefore, political parties should adopt appropriate policies and strategies, producing electorally competitive electoral market. This will seemingly produce a party identity, branding and voting during elections with the demand and supply voters.