A political party is an organized and well-structured public entity made up of people who share the same or similar political ideals and favor a common approach to solving political problems. A political party is an “organized group of people who have the same ideology, or who otherwise have the same political positions, and who field candidates for elections, in an attempt to get them elected and thereby implement the party’s agenda”.
An important feature of most political parties is the subscription to a set of ideals and principles commonly described or referred to as Ideology. Ideologies commemorates the identity of political parties. Political ideologies represent the fundamental principles on which the existence and operation of political parties are built on.
Public policy making is the art of public decision making to solve societal problems. The boundaries of public policy encompass all sectors of state life including education, economic productivity, defense, health, and cultural integration. Policy-making has been defined as the “process by which governments translate their political vision into programme and actions to deliver ‘outcomes’ – desired change in the real world”. It is the means by which governments translate the ideals captured in manifestos into real life projects and operations aimed at providing solutions to society problems.
The consequent effect of political party ideologies on public policy making is a significant case study worth of study and accurately measuring in order to fully understand the realization of projects and programs in solving politico-social and economic problems of state, and for the focus of this study, the case of the NDC and the NPP in Ghana since the start of the Fourth Republic.
Lansah Lawrence 