When democracies face crises, there is a version that makes headlines: a military coup, protests, a disputed election, harassment of political opposition.
But some crises do not generate headlines because they happen silently as individual decisions.
However, the aggregation of these silent individual decisions tells a bigger story.
Data from Afrobarometer's surveys over the past two decades, which look at our self-reported civic habits, deserve more attention.
What the Quiet Exit looks like
Let’s start with voting, the most visible act of active citizenship.
The share of Ghanaians answering “would not vote” to the Afrobarometer question on voting intentions ranged between five per cent and seven per cent.
In Round 9 (2022), that figure jumped to 23 per cent. By 2024, it had eased to 15 per cent — still more than double the norm captured by the survey.
Are citizens suggesting to us that they see no point in voting, which is paradoxical because a strong majority regularly say in the survey that we must use elections to choose our leaders.
The retreat from voting is not the only area of concern.
Afrobarometer also asks Ghanaians how often they contact the people meant to represent them — a Member of Parliament, a political party official, and an Assembly Member.
The answers, tracked from 1999 through 2024, describe not a decline but a norm.
Across all 10 rounds of the survey, roughly 84 to 88 per cent say they have never contacted an MP.
The pattern is the same for party officials and for local government representatives.
Collective action – citizens coming together to make demands on public officials – is another form of civic engagement.
In Round 1 (1999), 91 per cent said they would never “attend a protest march or demonstration”.
This declined to 68 per cent in Round 7(2017) but increased to 94 per cent in Round 10 (2024).
However, there is an exception to the disengagement (not contacting officials or a willingness to join a protest).
When asked about joining with others to raise an issue, that percentage has declined from 47 per cent (Round 1, 1999) to 31 per cent (Round 9, 2022).
Why quiet exit?
It is, therefore, difficult to blame citizens for their quiet exit because only 79 per cent (Round 2, 2022) said: “Members of Parliament never or only sometimes listen to what ordinary people have to say”.
In the most recent survey, Round 10 (2024), that number (84 per cent) remained high.
If civic engagement is a rational choice, then the only logical outcome when citizens feel their elected representatives generally do not listen is to “quietly exit”.
Even the unit of government closest to citizens – local government – faces the same response from citizens.
In Round 3 (2005), when citizens were first asked about how often their local government listen, 60 per cent answered “never or only sometimes”, which remained the same in Round 10 (2024).
Complicating the perception that these representatives do not listen is the perception of corruption and lack of trust. Citizens generally have expressed a low level of trust, for example, in Parliament.
From 42 per cent trusting Parliament “a lot” in Round 3 (2005), that number significantly declined to eight per cent in Round 10 (2024). On the corruption score, in Round 10 (2024), 54 per cent said “most or all” Members of Parliament are involved in corruption.
This is a significant increase from 21 per cent in Round 3 (2005).
The other reason that may help explain the quiet exit is citizens perceiving a lack of rule of law.
In Round 4 (2008), the difference between the percentage of citizens saying ordinary people versus officials “often or always go unpunished” when crimes are committed was only nine percentage points, with slightly more people believing officials tend to go unpunished than ordinary people. By Round 10 (2024), that gap had widened to forty-nine percentage points.
Essentially, citizens appear to be saying that officials are five times more likely to go unpunished when they commit crimes compared to ordinary people.
This quiet exit is not happening in a vacuum.
It reflects what citizens are perceiving about the country’s democracy - leaders who are not listening, low levels of trust, high perceptions of corruption, and the appearance of a lack of rule of law.
In such an environment, can we really be surprised that citizens are choosing to exit quietly?
What next?
Why does this matter for how we talk about democracy?
It matters because the health of Ghana’s democracy is not simply the absence of military interventions and the conduct of regular elections whose results are generally accepted.
It is also the nature of the relationship between citizens and the institutions that represent them.
That is the importance of what the data from the Afrobarometer survey is trying to alert us to.
Reversing it will require an intentional rebuilding of not just the civic culture but also the spaces through which citizens can be active.
The writer is the Project Director, Democracy Project.
