14 said tax cuts should be made permanent and 12 percent said they should be repealed. In contrast, 12 percent of Democratic-leaning respondents said they should be made permanent and 31 percent said they should be repealed. Similarly, 70 percent of Republicanleaning voters described themselves as pro-business and only 30 percent as not being probusiness. Democratic-leaning voters split 50-50.<sup>6</sup> Many observers have argued that the two main parties of Ghana are also programmatic with regard to economic policy. The New Patriotic Party, they argue, is a part of the anti-Nkrumah tradition of J.B. Danquah and President Kofi Busia, typically viewed as the party of business (or at least, of successful businessmen, or “big men”) (Nugent 1999, 290). The National Democratic Congress, on the other hand, began as a revolutionary, socialist party that rapidly became more populist and “developmental” (oriented towards public works).<sup>7</sup> _The Economist Intelligence Unit_ (2006, p. 10-12) described the NPP as the party of the market and of business, opposed to the interventionist policies of Ghana’s postindependence leader, Kwame Nkrumah and virulently opposed to the aggressive antibusiness policies followed by the Rawlings government immediately after taking power in 1981. The NDC, in contrast, traditionally favored more significant government intervention in the economy, but lost a definite policy identity as a result of major liberalizations that began under the Economic Recovery Program (ERP) around 1983. In addition, based on their survey of 690 voters in 2003, Lindberg and Morrison (2005) argue that partisan preferences differ by education, the rural-urban divide, income and occupation, the same dividing lines that one observes in mature democracies. They also conclude that Ghanaian parties convey programmatic messages to voters.

However, in other work, Lindberg (2003) carefully documents that clientelist payoffs from politicians to voters are so large that politicians hesitate to return to their constituencies because of the large sums they are expected to distribute when they are there. Moreover, there is little evidence of organizational arrangements within these parties that encourage programmatic consistency. On the contrary, the Center for the Development of Democracy-Ghana (CDD-Ghana) held debates for parliamentary candidates in 24 constituencies across the country in 2004 and recorded the proceedings of 15 of them in detail (CDD, no date). Of 14 NPP candidates who appeared in the 15 debates, eight made no mention at all of the national party, either its program or its past performance, despite the generally recognized success of the NPP’s first four years in government. Only five of all the NPP candidates mentioned policy issues that extended beyond the constituency; the remainder confined themselves exclusively to constituency-level policy interventions. The NDC candidates were even more emphatic in underplaying the national party, with only three of 12 candidates mentioning the national party’s accomplishments, and only two of 12 mentioning policy issues that transcended constituency borders.

Consistent with the relative weakness of programmatic appeals to voters in Ghana relative to the United States – despite the potential presence of both programmatic and

> 6 Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.  Survey of February 2002.  http://peoplepress.org/dataarchive/

> 7 Parties in the tradition of Kwame Nkrumah, also with a more left-leaning ideology, persist as well, but none approaches the two main parties as a political force; in the 2000 elections, the two main parties won 93 percent of the presidential votes and all but eight parliamentary seats (Nugent 2001, 422).