Abstract
AbstractPeople’s active participation in elections is one of the key measures of electoral democracy. The people’s lack of interests or apathy in elections tends to undervalue the democratic process, engender mistrust in political institutions, and enthrone unaccountable leadership. This is why voter turnout is a crucial aspect of electoral studies. Even though Nigeria has successfully undergone two decades of uninterrupted democracy, she may not be too fast in imbibing the tenets of electoral democracy which presupposes active people’s participation in the electoral process. This is because there has been a conspicuous decline in voter turnouts in presidential elections since 2003. There are several factors responsible for this decline. This paper analysed three key variables – violence, socioeconomic factors, and candidate’s popularity - with the use of Multivariate Correlation Analysis (a statistical procedure that calculates correlation coefficients of two or more variables to determine the strengths of their relationships). The study, therefore, finds that of the three variables, candidate’s popularity as indicated by voters’ preferences for candidate’s/running mate’s tribe, political party, and trust in candidate’s abilities provide stronger evidence of the declining turnouts in Nigerian presidential elections.
Highlights
Since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, there have been renewed interests in electoral democracy, especially in African countries
While the rallies were peaceful nationwide, there were reports of violence at rallies in Oyo1, Bayelsa2, Ogun3, Jigawa4, Kwara5, and other states with Akwa Ibom, Lagos and Rivers recording the most incidents of election-related violence leading to at least 46 deaths during the campaigns according to the European Union Election Observation Mission (EUOM)
Based on the C-V model adopted for this study, we found out that, though there were national patterns for all variables analysed, there were variations when variables were disaggregated sub-nationally
Summary
Since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, there have been renewed interests in electoral democracy, especially in African countries. This saw a significant increase in the number of countries that hold direct national elections. Electoral democracy is based on the assumption of full citizens’ participation in the electoral process. This is why voter turnout is one of the most critical indicators of citizens’ participation. While it is generally agreed that that higher voter turnout is a vital sign of democratic development, lower turnout is usually associated with voter apathy and mistrust of the electoral political process (Solijonor, 2016: 16).
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