WINNEBA, Ghana — Ama Maysiema danced down the main drag of this seaside town in sweaty exultation. Rumors had spread that opposition leader John Atta Mills had died. But there he was, standing up through the sunroof of a Toyota Land Cruiser, waving to supporters as they drummed, sang, and cheered their support. “He’s our savior!” Ms. Maysiema, 49, shouted, whirling in a blue dress as she waved palm fronds — once laid in the path of Jesus as he entered Jerusalem — to celebrate the apparent resurrection of her candidate. “People said he’s dead, but he’s alive!”

Reborn as well, over the past decade, has been democracy itself here in Ghana and among its neighbors along West Africa’s Atlantic coast. From Sierra Leone east to Nigeria, stability and at least a tentative version of multiparty politics have begun taking hold after many years of coups, military dictatorships, and civil war.

As Kenya has become the latest East African nation to descend into conflict, these West African countries have moved toward politics that are vigorous but rarely violent. Ms. Maysiema said she could not imagine Ghana’s partisan enthusiasms ever turning bloody, no matter what the outcome of the presidential vote scheduled for December.

“Ghanaians are a naturally peace-loving people,” Ms. Maysiema, a divorced mother of seven struggling to support her family selling bread on Winneba’s streets, said. “They will make the noise, but there’s no way they will draw blood.”

The progress in the region is far from uniform. Ghana and Benin have held several free elections with peaceful transfers of power; Togo, on the other hand, is still run by the son of a longtime strongman but in October had its first vote in which all major parties participated.

Civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ivory Coast have ended, and although Ivory Coast has yet to hold its first postwar vote, Liberia and Sierra Leone have elected leaders with popular mandates. Regional giant Nigeria, where military rule ended in 1999, has had a series of deeply flawed votes, but the disputes are being settled in an increasingly independent court system.

These countries are all freer, more stable, and more democratic than they were a decade ago, regional analysts say. Peace, however fragile, is the norm rather than war. And citizens of these nations increasingly are demanding responsive governance from their leaders.

“There is a clear direction where people more and more are asserting themselves,” executive director of the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding, Emmanuel Bombande, said. “So even where there is slow progress, things are much better.”

The exile and prosecution of Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, who spread conflict to the country’s neighbors, has helped stabilize the region, as have United Nations peacekeeping missions.

But just as important, Mr. Bombande said, Ghana and Benin have become models of durable, thriving democracies, and their experience has been transmitted to the region through growing numbers of independent radio stations, cellphones, and air links.

“The fact that in countries like Ghana there is a very clear definition of how democracy is the way forward does not only help Ghana,” Mr. Bombande said. “It is transmitted as a signal across the region.”

In 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to win independence from its colonial ruler, Britain, and ever since has seen itself in the vanguard of the continent’s progress. In only half a century, the nation has had a British-style parliamentary system, an American-style presidential system, one-party rule, socialism, capitalism, brutal coups, and an extended period of military rule.

The results varied. In the early 1980s, Ghana was so destitute that its neighbors, weary of the nation’s economic refugees, ordered millions of Ghanaians to return home.

Throughout years of trouble, Ghanaians remained uncommonly patriotic in a continent whose national borders, most drawn by European powers in the 19th century, frequently are dismissed as colonial remnants bearing little relationship to natural ethnic boundaries. Ghana’s national flag, with red, yellow, and green bars and a black star in the middle, decorates taxi windshields, T-shirts, and countless billboards. Rows of the flags flap on the streets in Accra, the capital, in the sultry ocean breeze.

“What I like about this country is people will not keep quiet,” a political science professor at the University of Ghana, Kwesi Jonah, said. “They will talk so the subject stays fresh in the public consciousness, in the public mind, for a very long time.”