The Politics of Ethnocentrism: A Viability Test of Ghana’s Democracy?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article assesses the use of ethnocentrism as a political strategy in Ghana’s electoral politics and the threat it poses to Ghana’s democracy. It focuses on the strategic ethno-political communication employed by politicians to wield voter support and how voters behave at polls. It reveals that prior to independence Ghana’s political parties were predominantly formed along ethnic and regional dimensions. This transcends into the current dispensation, as the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party are tagged as Ewe-Northerners party and Akans party, respectively. These ethnic affiliations tend to influence voters’ behaviour at the polls. There is, therefore, an increasing incidence of non-evaluative voting because of ethnocentrism in the Ghanaian political domain. As a result, politicking in Ghana tends to rely heavily on ethnic dimensions to solicit votes using the media as the main platform. The incidence of ethno-politics in Ghana has the tendency to reverse the democratic successes chalked because of the unnecessary tensions that are often associated with ethnic politics. This article recommends the need for responsible media practice to minimise this rising phenomenon in Ghana’s electoral politics. Also, it is our suggestion that the Political Parties ACT 574(2000) and the concerned articles of the 1992 constitution be reviewed to place sanctions on ethnocentrism as a political strategy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".