Africa Table - Election Quality and the Accountability of Legislators in Emerging Democracies: The Case of Ghana

Date
Wed February 10th 2016, 12:00 - 1:00pm
Event Sponsor
Center for African Studies
Location
Encina Hall West, Room 219, 417 Galvez Mall
Africa Table - Election Quality and the Accountability of Legislators in Emerging Democracies: The Case of Ghana

Join the Center for African Studies for our weekly lunchtime lecture series.

Speaker: George Ofosu, CDDRL Pre-doctoral Fellow, Stanford University.

George Ofosu is a Pre-doctoral Fellow at the CDDRL at Stanford. He is also a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. George specializes in Comparative Politics and Political Methodology (Experimental and Quantitative Methods). His research focuses on electoral fraud, the effects of domestic election monitoring, electoral accountability, research design, and the political economy of development in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Ofosu's dissertation uses experimental methods to interrogate the impacts of the quality of elections on the responsiveness of politicians to their constituents in developing countries, focusing on the case of Ghana's Members of Parliament. His dissertation has received funding from UCLA's International Institute.

George has researched on the effects of domestic election observers on electoral fraud in Ghana and Malawi. In Ghana, his collaborative research with four other scholars from UCLA (Joseph AsunkaSarah BrierleyMiriam Golden, and Eric Kramon) received funding from the National Science Foundation and the United Kingdom's Department of International Development (DFID). His work with Daniel Posner on Malawi's 2014 general elections received funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the US Institute of International Education (IIE). Before his research on the topic, George served as an assistant coordinator for Ghana's largest domestic election monitoring group, Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO). He has also consulted as a domestic election-monitoring expert to civil society groups in Malawi (2009), Nigeria (2011), and Guinea (2015) under the auspices of the National Democratic Institute (NDI).

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