What motivates voters during elections?
In my view, elections offer citizens an opportunity to express their policy preferences — a chance to signal, through the ballot box, which vision of governance they want to see realised.
When voters choose one party's candidate over another, the outcome is widely interpreted as an endorsement of that party's platform: the policies and programmes promised during the campaign are presumed to have prevailed in the contest of ideas.
Once in office, the expectation is that these promises will be translated into concrete policies and programmes — not only for those who voted for the winning party, but, in principle, for the broader citizenry as well.
But what happens after elections, and voters are called upon to evaluate the performance of the incumbent government?
Do citizens approach this task as impartial observers?
Or does the partisan loyalty that shaped their original vote also colour how they judge a government's performance once in power, leading supporters and opponents to arrive at starkly different verdicts on the same set of facts?
The Global Info Analytics Poll
On Monday, June 15, Global Info Analytics released its June Tracking Poll, which included a dedicated section on governance and performance.
Below is a breakdown of responses by party affiliation to several key questions that go to the heart of how Ghanaians are evaluating government performance.
The focus is on partisans of our two main political parties – the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
When asked about the direction of the country, nearly two-thirds of NPP partisans (63 per cent) believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. In sharp contrast, nearly nine in 10 NDC partisans (89 per cent) believe the country is heading in the right direction.
On the president’s job approval, NPP partisans disapprove of his performance by a 54 per cent - 37 per cent margin. On the other hand, NDC partisans approve of his job performance by a 91 per cent - 6 per cent margin.
These sharp contrasts between NDC and NPP partisans are intriguing, though not entirely surprising.
They are unsurprising because, as I have often argued, our politics today reflect deepening polarisation where partisans increasingly view the same reality through fundamentally different lenses.
Yet they remain intriguing because recent economic indicators paint a picture of a country on a positive trajectory, raising the question of why partisans arrive at such starkly different conclusions about both the direction of the country and the President's job performance.
But there are historical antecedents to this kind of partisan evaluation of presidential and government performance.
Here is an example of how partisans have rated the performance of presidents as captured by the Afrobarometer survey.
• In Round 4 (2008), 48 per cent of NDC partisans approved of President Kufuor’s performance compared to 95 per cent of NPP partisans.
• In Round 5 (2012), 88 per cent of NDC partisans approved of President Mill’s performance compared to 30 per cent of NPP partisans. Please note survey was completed prior to the late president’s passing.
• In Round 6 (2014), 69 per cent of NDC partisans approved of President Mahama’s performance compared to 11 per cent of NPP partisans.
• In Round 10 (2024), 11 per cent of NDC partisans approved of President Akufo-Addo’s performance compared to 64 per cent of NPP partisans.
This pattern is not confined to broad questions about national direction or presidential approval — it extends to how partisans evaluate government performance on specific policy matters throughout these same surveys. Whether the issue is the economy, job creation, health services, or education, the attitude of partisans is very consistent: opposition partisans rate the incumbent government less favourably than ruling party partisans.
Implications
This consistent behaviour tells the story of how enduring partisan attachments are beyond the ballot box.
In essence, long after elections are over, citizens continue to hold on to their partisan feelings.
If that is indeed what is happening, the implications extend well beyond how we interpret any single poll.
They go to the heart of what polls are meant to do — serve as feedback mechanisms through which citizens communicate to leaders their views on matters of governance and politics.
More importantly, what does this mean for bureaucrats — unelected officials who play a key role in policy and programme implementation — and for elected officials, who must govern knowing that a significant share of citizens may judge their performance through a partisan lens, regardless of what they do?
This tension between objective assessment and partisan attachment is real — and this is where independent voices become critical in our public discourse about how the country is doing.
This is not to dismiss the views of partisans themselves; after all, their survey responses likely reflect some blend of partisan attachment and lived experience, and that reality should not be discounted.
But in a very polarised political context, independent voices play an indispensable role in shaping how we discuss and assess the country's actual trajectory.
The writer is the Project Director, Democracy Project
