Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
What does it mean to perform democracy rather than practise it?
Performative democracy is a system where the appearance of democratic participation is cultivated to satisfy external expectations, while the substance of redistribution, accountability, and structural transformation is evaded. It is not simply a weak or partial democracy–it is a deliberately crafted illusion of reform. The performance includes elections that do not disrupt elite power, consultations that do not inform decisions, and policies that proclaim equity without enabling it. This performance is strategic: it protects dominant interests while signalling alignment with global democratic norms. In Ghana, it is enacted through laws with quotas but limited reach, meetings with women but no gendered influence, and documents thick with progressive language but thin on enforcement. Understanding performative democracy means recognizing the difference between being seen to act–and acting.
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In many postcolonial states, democracy no longer signals a redistribution of power but rather signals alignment of interests. Elections are being held. Consultations are staged. Women are appointed. Policies are drafted with the right words. But the underlying hierarchies remain largely untouched. In these settings, governance begins to mimic transformation. Power wears a mask of reform.
Ghana is no exception. The rituals of democracy are carefully observed, but the outcomes they promise are deferred. Behind the public spectacle of gender equity and participatory governance lies a stubborn continuity of exclusion. Representation is displayed, not enforced. Reform is enacted in symbols, not in structure. This is what I call a performative democracy system in which democratic gestures are performed to appease international frameworks, local constituencies, and donor expectations, while evading the cost of real political change.
Staging equity
In the performance of democracy, policy becomes theatre. Ghana’s parliament currently includes only 43 women out of 275 seats–just 14.5%. This statistic has hovered around the same level for over a decade, despite a revolving door of equity policies and political commitments. In the 2016 general elections, women held only 37 seats; that number rose slightly to 40 in the 2020 elections, and again to 43 by 2025. These incremental gains mask stagnation.
The legislative body that should lead in modelling national equity remains structurally male-dominated. Despite decades of public commitments to inclusion, political parties rarely nominate women in winnable constituencies, and internal party structures remain unwelcoming to female leadership. Representation is confined to women’s wings and symbolic appointments, rather than meaningful legislative power. Yet every major policy on governance and development since the 1990s has claimed a commitment to gender inclusion. From the Ghana Shared Growth and Development Agenda to the National Gender Policy, equity is a recurring motif. But decades of promise have yielded few material results. Women remain underrepresented in decision-making bodies across nearly every sector.
This gap between narrative and reality is not a failure of capacity–it is a function of political design. Symbolic inclusion is far less threatening than structural transformation. It allows elites to claim progress without surrendering control. In Ghana, the aesthetics of representation have come to substitute for actual redistribution. As one female civil society leader told me, “They let us speak, but the decisions were already made.”
The long road to nowhere: affirmative action as ritual
In performative democracy, policies function like marionette theatre–suspended by strings of symbolism and controlled by the unseen hand of elite power. Every speech, reform, and gender quota become part of a carefully orchestrated stage play, where the goal is not transformation but spectacle. Representation is choreographed for applause. Affirmative action targets are waved like wands, not to redistribute power but to maintain the illusion of movement. The hand is visible–the laws are real–but the strings remain in control. This metaphor reveals the underlying logic: what appears as progress is often the rehearsal of inclusion, scripted to satisfy an audience while leaving the structure untouched. When governance is choreographed rather than enacted, we are no longer witnessing democracy–we are watching a performance.
Historically, Ghana has taken methodical steps towards formal gender inclusion–beginning with the Representation of the People Act in 1960, which appointed ten women to the National Assembly moving through a 1998 administrative directive targeting 40% female representation in public bodies, and culminating in the Affirmative Action (Gender Equity) Bill passed on 30 July 2024, which mandates phased quotas–30% by 2026, 35% by 2028, and 50% by 2030–in public office, political appointments, and the private sector. But the measure of impact will rest on what happens beyond the script.
Ghana’s policy commitments to gender equity are embedded in several key legislative and strategic documents. Chief among them is the long-delayed Affirmative Action (Parliament passes Affirmative Action Gender Equity Bill 2024 | Ghana News Agency), formally passed in 2024 as Act 1121. This Act mandates progressive gender quotas across public institutions: 30% representation by 2026, 35% by 2028, and 50% by 2030. It establishes compliance committees, monitoring frameworks, and legal sanctions–including fines and up to one year of imprisonment–for institutions that fail to meet the targets. The Act aims to correct the persistent underrepresentation of women in decision-making roles and aligns with broader frameworks such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 (Goal 5 | Department of Economic and Social Affairs), the African Union’s Agenda (Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want. | African Union), and Ghana’s own 2015 National Gender Policy (Ghana National Gender Policy – Plateforme AGGRC).
As of 2025, women hold only 21.5% of leadership roles across governance sectors–a significant gap from the 50% goal. Bridging the 28.5-point deficit in less than five years would require not only strict enforcement of the law but a fundamental restructuring of political parties, candidate nomination systems, and public sector hiring practices.
While the 50% benchmark is normatively ambitious, it remains structurally vulnerable. Without bold institutional reforms and resource-backed implementation, the target risks functioning as another symbolic gesture–more about international alignment than domestic equity. It raises the uncomfortable but necessary question: is this law a genuine roadmap to justice, or yet another act in the long-running performance of democracy?
The long road to the Affirmative Action Act’s passage reveals as much about Ghana’s political calculus as it does about its democratic performance. It is legislation caught between mandate and mimicry–drafted to promote equity but born into a system more practised in appearance than transformation. The long road to the Affirmative Action Act’s passage reveals as much about Ghana’s political calculus as it does about its democratic performance. For instance, the bill’s origins date back to 1998, yet it only passed into law in 2024 after years of revisions and wavering political will, suggesting procedural inertia overshadowed substantive intent.
The cost of a two-decade delay?
The answer may lie less in political will than in political optics. Ghana has faced increasing scrutiny over its gender equity record, particularly considering its commitments under international frameworks like the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union’s Agenda 2063. The 2025 Act arrived just as the country prepared to host several regional governance forums–an opportune moment for legislative symbolism.
Critics worry that the bill, while more robust than its predecessors, may still fall short in practice. Although the 2025 Affirmative Action Act includes political sanctions and monitoring provisions–marking a notable departure from earlier equity framework, questions remain about whether those sanctions will be activated and enforced consistently across ministries and regions. Implementation challenges persist, particularly around sustained funding for oversight bodies and the administrative reach of the law beyond Accra.
Breaking the script
When democratic legitimacy is judged by appearance rather than outcomes, performance becomes strategy–not accident. In this context, performative democracy is not flawed–it is ineffective by design. It mimics the gestures of reform while protecting the architecture of exclusion. From international development frameworks to national legislation, Ghana’s gender equity agenda increasingly reflects this tension between appearance and alteration. The 50% parity goal, the quota mandates, the affirmations of inclusion–all may be necessary components of reform, but they also risk serving as its replacement. In my research, what emerged most sharply was not just the absence of power redistribution, but the presence of a meticulously curated democratic performance. Performative democracy is not sustained by ignorance. It is sustained by plausibility of institutions to appear democratic while resisting redistribution. This performance persists because it satisfies multiple audiences: donors, voters, and elites. But if equity is to move from symbol to structure, this script must be broken.
Swani R. Keelson is a Doctor of International Affairs and a semiotician whose research examines the symbolic architecture of global governance. Her recent doctoral thesis, Paper Tigers: Deconstruction and Semiotics of Gender Equity as Signifier in Water Governance Policies – A Case Study in Ghana (Johns Hopkins SAIS, 2025), introduces a pioneering framework that applies Derridean deconstruction and semiotic theory to interrogate how policy language performs gender equity without enforcing it. Keelson’s work bridges post-structuralist theory, critical policy analysis, and African development studies, offering new tools for decoding performative governance and the semiotics of institutional reform.
