Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Ghanaian Slums: Constructing Democracy in Unexpected Places

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Scholars and international media commonly portray slums as ungoverned urban communities outside the reach of the state. Yet African slums reveal considerable variation in their ability to access and maintain public services. Some slums are able to attract state resources to build toilets, construct sewers, pave roads, collect garbage, and provide security. Other slums secure resources but are unable to maintain them--sewers overflow, roads deteriorate, and police do not secure order. A third type of slum struggles to access or maintain any public services. The central question of this dissertation asks: Despite similar contexts of weak formal institutions and poor living conditions, why are some slum communities able to attract and maintain public services while others are unable to attract and manage these same services? By examining the variation in how slum communities demand, secure, and maintain public services, this dissertation provides important and overlooked insights into the process of local-level democratization in Africa. The dissertation hypothesizes that a slum's success depends on three underlying political conditions--the type of community leadership, the form of community organization, and the degree of state legal recognition. These conditions enable or impede the development of accountability mechanisms that residents use to hold their leaders to account. The project combines ethnographic methods, focus groups, and a household survey in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. The comparative ethnographic case studies are based in slum communities with similar population profiles, but with varying levels of public service access and maintenance. The survey is novel because it will consider all slum communities in Ghana and will include embedded experiments that test trust in leaders and informal institutions. The intellectual merit of the project is significant. First, it contributes to investigations of state and society. The project re-conceptualizes slums as political spaces where a slum's position toward the state--specifically its degree of legal recognition and level of state investment that it attracts--provides a potentially powerful formula to understand variation between slums. Second, the dissertation shifts the study of democracy away from national institutions to the community-level where informal institutions shape political activity. Third, the project treats public goods provision as a political process that includes demands (from the residents), distribution (by the government), and maintenance (by the community). Fourth, the dissertation advances scholarship on the rule of law in developing countries. The project also has broader implications because it has the potential to impact policy-making aimed at democracy promotion, development, and slum-upgrading initiatives. As the number of individuals living in slums approaches one billion people, there is an emerging need to treat slums as dynamic spaces and analytic sites for political inquiry.