Chapter 1 power and control/distribution of state resources. Elections also provide the opportunity for groups to express other grievances, which may relate to such issues as land ownership, boundary demarcation or determination, and chieftaincy succession(CDD, 2008). To be sure, the degree of violence that accompanies elections in Ghana come nowhere close to the tragedies experienced in the aftermath of elections in some African countries. Cases of violence during elections in Ghana have been largely localized and confined. Yet the underlying factors that inspire electoral violence in Ghana and other African countries are not markedly different. They have often include challenges such as zero-sum patterns of political interaction, pervasive neo-patrimonial arrangements, and more importantly the failure of institutional mechanisms to cope with fraught political dynamics. Violence in Ghanaian politics, as elsewhere on the African continent, appear to be the surface expressions of more profound structural difficulties pertaining to such issues as ethnocentrism, political polarization, exclusionary politics, multiple and competing centres of authority(traditional/ modern), youth unemployment, and inadequate state capacity. While formal and informal institutions, which are indispensable for managing these difficulties, continue to develop at a fairly steady pace, they still find it difficult to respond effectively to the challenges being encountered. In Ghana, the violent manner in which the various political(and economic) undercurrent are given expression, particularly by the political class and their supporters during election periods, for example through direct clashes between opposing local party 25