Abstract
The conventional notions on the relationship between democracy and development are that democracy accelerates development. Based on the Nigeria experience, this paper argues that both democracy and authoritarianism are social system based political ideologies that derives their character from the wider society, which is conservative. Thus, issues that characterised military autocracy; denial of human rights, corruption, mismanagement and poverty have continued to replicate in the nascent democracy from 1999 to date. It therefore postulates that the permeability of democratic-authoritarian boundaries makes for virus replication across regime typologies in an open political system.
Highlights
There is a general assumption that richer countries are generally democratic (Persson and Tabellin, 2006)
Beyond Democracy and Autocracy A popular staple of contemporary development analysts; democracy better propels development than autocracy is controverted by empirical evidence from the Nigerian experience
The pre-eminence of virus inter-facing across regime boundaries points to the roots of crisis reproduction and the failure of the Nigerian project since 1960
Summary
There is a general assumption that richer countries are generally democratic (Persson and Tabellin, 2006). Within the context of the ongoing epistemological controversy over the relationship between democracy and authoritarianism as activators or suppressors of development, this paper seeks empirical evidence from Nigeria. To capture and explain the unity and convergence of democracy and autocracy as explanatory variables for the crisis of the Nigerian political project, we here postulate; there is interfacing of political virus across regime boundaries.
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