Political accountability is a central theme on the international donor agenda. It figures prominently in governance projects and research sponsored by donors like DFID, USAID and Sida, and it features as one of the priority areas in the African Power and Politics Programme (APPP). Because of this prominent place in the minds of the donors, much of the effort, both in theory and practice has been devoted to assessing the progress that African countries have made towards an accountability system based on criteria drawn from a model of Western democracy. While many countries have made some progress in this regard, not the least with holding free and fair elections, governance assessments continue to highlight institutional shortcomings. On the scale offered by these assessments African countries, with a few exceptions, tend to occupy the bottom end. Using a metaphor, the glass tends always to be presented as half-empty, emphasizing what is missing, rather than being labeled half-full and thus conveying a message that progress has been made.

Turning this around is the key objective of the APPP. Finding out how Africans cope with governance challenges using their own wits and assessing the prospect that these patterns will lead to a shift toward better governance is its practical research agenda. This implies a focus on institutional diversity and varying outcomes rather than an assessment of a single institutional model expected to produce a preferred outcome, which is the way current mainstream approaches to governance in Africa work. It also implies a review of the key concepts and how they may be operationalized and used in obtaining relevant and valid empirical data. In short, it calls for a new way of studying political accountability in Africa.

This does not mean that the APPP starts from scratch. Its agenda builds on what others have said and done. Papers by David Booth (2008) and Staffan Lindberg (2009), the former trying to find a sufficiently strong and meaningful platform for all members of the consortium to work from, the latter laying the ground for how accountability may be approached in individual projects, have been important stepping-stones for preparing the empirical phase which members are now entering. This paper builds on these significant contributions while at the same time trying to add new insights into how political accountability of Members of Parliament may be better understood and studied.

The purpose of the paper is to discuss what an approach to political accountability that starts from the premise of ‘working with the grain’ in Africa would look like. It begins with a brief review of the concept of political accountability. The primary empirical material, admittedly limited in scope, is a series of interviews with MPs in Ghana in June 2009. The findings from these interviews are discussed in the light of what has been said about MP accountability elsewhere in Africa, especially in East Africa, thus providing a comparative perspective on the issues raised by the Ghanaian respondents. The paper then proceeds by highlighting the conceptual and methodological implications of the empirical findings before proposing the framework for a comparative study of MPs’ accountability that would include other African countries where such a study would add further insights of both theoretical and policy value. Its main conclusion is twofold: parties and party systems matter in any effort to strengthen the accountability of elected representatives in Africa. At the same time, however, these politicians must be allowed to make progress toward more effective institutions by being allowed to ‘live’ their own rules according to their own culture and habits rather than being prematurely forced into Western institutional straightjackets that frustrate rather than facilitate progress toward democracy.

* This report is one of the outputs of the Africa Power and Politics research project, based at the ODI in London. Readers can access the project website for further outputs. (http://www.institutions-africa.org/page/home)