Blog 7

Chase Pulley

2 November 2012

Pl Sc 150-002

Blog 7 Duverger’s law

            The country I am using in discussing Duverger’s law is Ghana. Some basic information about Ghana and its government style/electoral rules is. First Ghana has 230 single member constituencies that are all directly elected. They are elected via the direct simple majority system. (Inter Parliamentary Union) The average district magnitude is one since there are 230 single member constituencies.

            Using the information on Wikipedia’s election world site the number of effective parties in Ghana is 2.3. The moment I saw the information I automatically knew that it was going to be just a little over two based on the breakup of the votes and seats. Out of the 230 seats available the two effective parties got 128 and 94 respectively. From the information listed above we can see that Duverger’s law is true for Ghana and is quite helpful in understanding their electoral rules and parties.       

            In looking at the ace project’s website I say something that would lead me to believe that Ghana has an open/preferential list structure. In the section Nomination of candidates for parliamentary election in the Presidential/parliamentary elections laws guide it said that the candidate needs to fill a nomination paper and then either have him or the person who is seconding him deliver it to the election commission.

 

            Looking at many sources I could not find any information on thresholds in Ghana’s election system. The only thing that came close was a rule about when someone is running for an elected position they must put in a deposit and if they get at least 12% of the valid votes than they would get a refund of the amount they paid. Though one point semi related to this is, that there is a threshold when running for president in Ghana.

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

"ACE Electoral Knowledge Network." ACE Electoral Knowledge Network. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Oct. 2012. <http://aceproject.org/>.

"Elections in Ghana." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 29 Oct. 2012. Web. 31 Oct. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Ghana>.

"Inter-Parliamentary Union." Inter-Parliamentary Union. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Oct. 2012. <http://www.ipu.org/>.