MIASA & Departmental Monthly Seminar Series, November 2019 Edition

MIASA & DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
Departmental Monthly Seminar Series
November,  2019 Edition

Topic: We Disagree on Politics, But we Eat Together: The Parliament as a Social Space in Ghana, Togo and Sierra Leone

Date: 27th November, 2019

Time: 3:00PM

Venue: Kofi Drah Conference Room (Department of Political Science

Speaker: Dr Anja Osei (University of Konstanz, Germany, MIASA Fellow)

Abstract

Actor-centric approaches to democratization place an emphasis on the development of a consensus on the ''rules of the game''. Building on theories of institutional socialization, this paper is arguing that parliaments can be important arenas for the pacification of political struggles and the development of cooperation between political opponents: MPs learn to cooperate with competitors both within and outside their parties and newcomers tend to adapt to the behavior of senior members. The empirical analysis is built on social network data collected in the national assemblies of three African countries: Ghana, Togo and Sierra Leone. It will be shown that the level of inter-party reconciliation and cooperation varies systematically with the level of democracy. At the individual level, the length of tenure increases the likelihood of forming cooperative ties between MPs belonging to different parties. In other words, the parliament is a social space that might further political reconciliation and inter-party trust, and thereby contributes positively to democratization.