A Politics of Failure: The Political Geography of Ghanaian Elections, 1954–1979

Although the geography of elections is a major growth point of modern geography, this research area has neglected an important category of elections, those occurring in Third World states. This paper seeks to rectify this limitation by analyzing Ghanaian elections. Studying such Third World elections, however, requires rethinking many theoretical issues on the nature of the state and the political party. This paper outlines a political economy argument for interpreting the electoral geography of Third World countries. The Ghanaian case study is set within a world-systems framework in which the location of peripheral states in the worldeconomy can result in an unstable “politics of failure.'’Ghana is treated as a classic case of the politics of failure. We show how the cultural geography of Ghana is filtered through its political geography in attempts to create a new economic geography.