Continuity and Recovery: Role-Conditioned Mandate Argumentation in Ghana’s 2016 Presidential Campaign

Author(s)	Dr. Daniel Afrifa-Yamoah
Country	Ghana
Abstract	This article compares how incumbent John Dramani Mahama and challenger Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo organized competing mandate arguments in Ghana’s 2016 presidential campaign. It analyzes a balanced corpus of eight source-verified texts across governing addresses, manifestos, campaign launches, and reported rallies. Combining Functional Theory with discourse-historical and legitimation analysis, the study identifies two role-conditioned trajectories. Mahama converts achievements, difficult decisions, and bounded responsibility into a warrant for continuity; Akufo-Addo converts crisis, culpability, citizen injury, and policy readiness into a warrant for recovery through alternation. Both candidates compete over lived experience and inclusive agency, rather than dividing neatly into record-based reason and emotion-based promise. I call this relational pattern role-conditioned mandate argumentation. Political position structures evidentiary and defensive burdens without determining linguistic choice. The analysis explains how continuity and change were made reasonable; it does not infer electoral effects from Akufo-Addo’s victory.
Keywords	campaign discourse; Ghana; incumbency; legitimation; political argumentation; presidential challengers
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-23
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.86364

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