Election Discourse in Africa: Some Critical Considerations

This chapter situates the vision for this collection within a much larger conversation about the state of the scholarship on African political communication. The chapter recognizes the limited work, within several analytical traditions, on political communication from the continent, suggesting that this issue needs to be resolved with more publications from various African countries. In addition to calls for more research on Africa, the chapter argues that there are also other critical concerns that need to be addressed if we are to expand the scholarship on Africa. The chapter recognizes the important contributions of extant work on African politics but highlights the limited range of the existing scholarship despite the complex manifestations of African politics. Some of the issues that need further exploration include engaging diverse subjects (in terms of people, voices, and topics) on the question of politics and elections in Africa, expanding our analysis of context (to include geographical, social, and linguistic senses) and building theoretical and conceptual framings that respond to the specific modes of political performances in Africa. The chapters in the collection examine the communicative aspects of the unique sociopolitical (con)texts on electioneering in Ghana to expand understanding of electoral politics and processes in African contexts.