Managing Election- Relation Violence for Democratic Stability in Ghana This indicates that the politics of patronage is a two-way street in Ghana whereby the'patronised' are active participants and the game is not the exclusive reserve of elites. Lindberg(2003:127­128; 2010:123-127) illustrates this further in his survey of members of parliament(MPs) regarding their election campaigns. His data revealed that the MPs were actively engaged in patron­client networks to a significant degree in a bid to get re-elected. Additionally, the trend of patronage politics had shown a consistent increase since Ghana's return to democratic rule. Lindberg concludes that the persistent pattern of patronage politics is a threat to democratic consolidation because it threatens vertical accountability and legitimacy by breeding alternative pacts of loyalty, expectations of corruption and tendencies to delegate mandates. The executive branch's grip on power and control of patronage has, moreover, stalled the constitutionally mandated devolution of administrative power to District Assemblies and their sub­structures. Presidential appointments of District Chief Executives (DCEs) and a third of the members of the District Assemblies(DAs) are often made on the basis of loyalty or kickbacks rather than merit.(Gyimah-Boadi, 2009) This has impeded any meaningful decentralization and has led to a lack of responsiveness and accountability to the citizenry on the part of these agencies and their officials. Local development also suffers from the award of service delivery contracts to party chairmen and their cronies. It must be noted here that democratic decentralization requires the transfer of power and resources to sub-national authorities which are'a) largely or wholly independent of the central government; and b) democratically elected'(Manor, 1995: 81-2). This has resulted in several stakeholders expressing their preference for 191