Election Quality and the Dynamics of Voter Turnout: Evidence from Nigeria

• In Event: Consequences of African Electoral Integrity

Abstract

Existing theories of voter turnout often fail to account for how short-term changes in the quality of elections influence citizens’ willingness to cast their ballot (Birch, 2010). In regimes that have less experience holding multiparty elections, while citizens may have made up their minds who they intend to vote for, their propensity to vote on election day is contingent on several factors including their expectations of ballot secrecy, integrity of the vote count, and free and unhindered access to the voting process. This paper leverages the timing of Nigerian elections where federal elections (president & national assembly) are held two weeks before state elections (gubernatorial & state assembly). We suggest that one of the most reliable signals of election quality is what happens immediately before, on, or after national elections. Therefore, significant changes in the quality of national elections may drastically alter the costs citizens associate with voting in subsequent state elections, relative to the benefits.

Specifically, we combine subnational turnout data and reports from domestic observers to develop a dynamic model that explains relative changes in subnational turnout between the 2019 national and state elections. Although reforms to Nigeria’s electoral process helped to increase citizens’ confidence in the quality of the 2019 elections, we hypothesize that in states that experienced electoral irregularities during the national elections (e.g. voter suppression, violence by state and non-state actors, or the malfunctioning of voting equipment), citizens were less likely to participate in subsequent state elections, even after controlling for other correlates of turnout. The results of our preliminary analysis suggest that turnout was more likely to decrease in states where voting equipment malfunctioned during the federal elections. The paper has implications for research on the dynamics of turnout in new democracies, especially those that hold staggered and two-round elections.

Authors

• Bodunrin Joseph Adebo, National Democratic Institute

• Nicholas Kerr