Although the term “elite” is frequently used in scholarly debates on Africa, there is surprisingly little systematic engagement with this topic of research. It is often claimed that the wave of democratisation in the 1990s has not led to a substantial renewal of the political personnel, but has rather increased intra-elite competition for political office and state resources. Moreover, there are characteristic patterns of behaviour and styles of rule that were quickly imitated even by political newcomers. On the other hand, however, there is considerable variation in regime types on the continent. Countries like Ghana have made considerable progress in democratization, while others are still governed by authoritarian regimes or suffer from civil conflict.
In 2006, Higley and Burton proposed a typology of elite structures and corresponding regime types which could contribute a lot to our understanding of regime trajectories. Taking this as a starting point, the paper will first discuss some theoretical issues pertaining to the study of elites in Africa. In the empirical part, material from a field research project in Ghana will be used to show if and how an elite consensus on the “rules of the game” has emerged in the country and what the potential threats to this consensus are. Furthermore, the paper will present biographical data of parliamentarians and cabinet members to demonstrate how the social and ethnic composition of elites has changed over time and what these findings imply for the sustainability of democracy.
