Managing Election- Relation Violence for Democratic Stability in Ghana and a baseline survey of three regions of Ghana(Western, Central and 127 Volta), this chapter presents an analysis of women's experiences with 128 elections. The first section discusses the gendered nature of political competition and participation in Ghana; the second section examines the types of discriminatory practices(including election-related violence) perpetrated against women as well as the role of women in these contexts. The final section proffers some recommendations for remedying the current situation and optimising female political participation. Locating Gender in the Institutional Pre-requisites of Ghana's Democracy Aside from the post-Cold War shift in global relations and the attendant growth of democracy as the favoured model of governance across the world, Ghana's return to constitutional rule was also driven by economic considerations; principally, the need to halt and reverse the country's age-long economic decline and thereby reposition the country within the global community. As a result, the democratic institutions that developed were primarily geared towards enhancing the factors of production through the democratization of the political space and the liberalization of markets. These institutions were developed largely with a focus on the public sphere and without due consideration to the social relational contexts within which the roles, functions and character of the various constituents of the political sphere are defined. Put differently, the democratic institutions were evolved under an assumption that there was a homogenous constituency of human beings whose freedoms and liberties needed to be guaranteed for development and 127 The choice of sample populations was made solely in terms of the availability of the data collected during 2009-2011 for a different study but which contained information relevant for the chapter. 128 Although there had been some attempts at democracy, they were all truncated by the military. The 1992 transition, which has endured until now, is the longest continuous experience of constitutional democracy in Ghana. 279