Introduction: Conceptual Approaches to Nigerian Federalism

Abstract

This chapter provides a brief background on the practice of federalism in Nigeria. It further explores mainstream approaches to the study of federalism with the aim to highlight their relevance to federal studies. Given that federalism is a multifaceted subject due to its institutional, constitutional, political, sociological and economic dimensions, it is not out of place to use one or a combination of approaches to answer key questions that border on the practice of federalism in Nigeria. However, the approaches do not capture the influence of the political economy on the structure and practice of federalism in the country. Given this shortcoming in the existing literature, this study develops a new framework to analyse the centrality of the political economy to explain federalism in Nigeria. The ‘political economy’ approach represents a major contribution of this study to the body of literature not only in the context of Nigeria-related studies but also in the wider context of literature on federalism.