Communication and Electoral Politics in Ghana

This edited volume examines communicative perspectives on Africa's electoral politics, taking Ghana's 2020 general election as a focus of investigation.

This interdisciplinary volume redresses gaps in the literature by highlighting the relevance of language and communication to electoral politics in Sub-Saharan Africa in the period of a global pandemic. Besides accounting for local influences, the collection demonstrates how election discourse can take on unique properties of specific transnational contexts within which it is conceived and performed. Additionally, the non-Western perspective it offers is relevant in highlighting how unique or important socio-political situations can shape language use in specific local contexts and give socio-political actors an argumentative advantage in promoting their objectives. By examining how the communicative and linguistic choices made in election discourse are conditioned by culture-specific politics, the volume sheds light on how electioneering communications are most persuasively narrativized when they capitalize on local sentiment and language features characteristic of local communities and audiences. To this end, the edited collection is timely and will contribute not only to a comprehensive understanding of political communication and the interplay of campaign discourse, election propaganda and presidential rhetoric, but will also have implications for Africa's current and future political systems and illustrate the important role of language/discourse in political decolonization processes.