Nigerian Presidential Election Research Articles

Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Discourse on the 2023 Nigerian General Elections

Sentiment analysis entails discerning whether text conveys positive, neutral, or negative sentiments to ascertain the mood of the public concerning a given entity. This method relies on natural language processing, computational linguistics, and text analysis to identify, extract, and methodically analyze affective and subjective data. The 2023 Nigerian presidential election holds immense significance for the nation, determining its leadership for the subsequent four years. Consequently, comprehending public sentiment regarding the electoral process becomes paramount. This study sought to gauge public sentiment concerning the 2023 Nigerian General Elections by analyzing tweets related to candidates and their political parties. Leveraging three machine learning (ML) techniques—SVM, RF, and XGBoost—we aimed to categorize tweets as negative, positive, or neutral. Our dataset comprised a substantial volume of tweets, meticulously pre-processed to eliminate irrelevant content and noise. Results showcased the outstanding performance of RF and XGBoost in tweets classification and sentiment identification about the electoral process with the highest accuracy (93%) and precision (96%), occurring on neutral opinions. These results findings offer crucial insights into public opinion regarding candidates, their political parties, and the electoral procedure, benefiting researchers, political analysts and decision-makers alike. It suggests that 43% of the electorate expressed neutral sentiments about the elections, while 33% expressed positive sentiments, such as optimism about the electoral process, support for specific candidates, satisfaction with the results of the election, or excitement for taking part in democracy. Meanwhile, 24% of the electorate expressed negative sentiments, such as dissatisfaction with political candidates, criticism of the electoral processes, worries about fairness, or skepticism about the outcome. This research underscores the significance of sentiment analysis in comprehending public opinion and its potential contributions to political discourse.

Beyond tribal politics for e-participation and development: social media influence on Nigeria's 2023 presidential general election

PurposeThe study investigates factors like media, tribal, religious and party politics' influence on Nigerias’ 2023 presidential election choice. It confirms dominant social media platforms and examines their influence on election polls, e-participation and political candidate choice. The main objectives of this study are to: investigate if tribal, religious and party politics affect the respondent’s choice of a presidential candidate, ascertain the respondent's most used social media platform for political engagement and determine how social media platforms influenced the election polls during the 2023 Nigerian presidential election.Design/methodology/approachA sample size of 384 registered voters was used to survey three states in Southeast Nigeria hinged on the technological acceptance model, the instrumentalist theory of ethnicity and the theory of reasoned action.FindingsThe study found that tribal politics did not influence political candidates during the 2023 Nigerian presidential election. However, religious and party politics influenced their choices as well as X (Twitter), found as the most used and most influential social media platform vital for enhancing participatory democracy and informing people at real-time.Research limitations/implicationsThe researchers experienced challenges such as ensuring that the respondents filled the questions appropriately to reduce the number of void questionnaires and a funding problem since they had yet to receive any grant to enhance the study.Originality/valueThe study commends improved Internet connectivity and accessibility among the citizens for increased political engagement on social media. It also recommends that the Nigerian government enforce the rule of law in politics to enable diverse tribes and religions to experience democratic e-participation and development without marginalisation or subjugation by incumbent power. The findings affirm that social media is apt in political communication during the 2023 presidential elections in Nigeria. The study is a contribution to knowledge, timely and original.

An Evaluation of Selected Newspapers' Reporting on Hate Speeches during the 2015 Presidential Election in Nigeria

Election stakeholders in Nigeria continue to express worry over the growing trend of hate speech, particularly during the 2015 general elections. The influx of advertisements, political innuendos, and propaganda messages in some chosen individuals who were in the forefront of delivering hate speeches in Nigeria prior to the 2015 general elections increased the socio-political climate. With regard to the 2015 Nigerian presidential election, this study aims to investigate the effects of hate speech from a few media reports. Secondary data are heavily cited in this study such as textbooks, official reports and publications, Internet resources, journals, among others. As for analysing the various data gathered, content analysis was performed. This study found that hate speech coming from particular media reports contributed to electoral-related violence and mistrust among Nigerians. Consequently, the electoral process' credibility is affected. This study recommended, among other things, that election stakeholders, in particular INEC, CSOs, Elections Observers and Monitors, should also keep an eye on the media, particularly native language radio stations that utilise hate speech to fan the ember of ethnic and religious separation.

Campaigns of Calumny: Social Media Hate Speech and Propaganda in the 2019 Nigerian Presidential Election

Campaigns of Calumny: Social Media Hate Speech and Propaganda in the 2019 Nigerian Presidential Election

A critical discourse analysis of some selected 2019 Nigerian presidential election campaign advertisements on social media

Political campaign advertisements are one of the mediums where the electorates hope to get the right information to help them make a choice before an election. The study explored the lexico-syntactic patterns, discourse strategies and how they were used to create ideologies in the 2019 Presidential campaign advertisements. The study adopts the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Van Dijk called socio-cognitive model and his (2000) model on principles that express ideological stances. Five campaign advertisements were purposively selected for analysis from the following social media platforms: Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and also the following media outlets punch.com, nairaland.com, to mention but a few. The campaign advertisements chosen featured the two major candidates, Atiku Abubakar of the PDP (Peoples Democratic Party) and Muhamadu Buhari of the APC (All Progressives Congress) in the 2019 Presidential elections. The study revealed that the campaign advertisements chosen used discourse markers that emphasized ideologies like; APC is a haven for corrupt Nigerians, Atiku is a thief, Buhari and Atiku do not care about the poor, Buhari is incorruptible, are among other ideologies that the campaign advertisements tried to portray. The study submits that discourse was negative especially in the presentation of the ‘out group’ (the political opponents) and that the ideology of the text creators was a very strong force in all the texts analyzed. Therefore, the electorates need to be more critical in reading these presidential campaign advertisements before forming their opinions and taking actions, in order to deepen our democracy.

X-Raying Two-Partism in the Nigerian Fourth Republic’s Presidential Elections

One of the features of the Nigerian Fourth Republic that started on May 29, 1999, was the dominance of two-partism in every circle of Presidential election between 1999 and 2019. Two-partism was engrained by the military regime that handed over to the civilian administration at the beginning of the Fourth Republic in 1999, and it was sustained by varieties of factors that include the influence of money politics, a culture of electoral fraud, and the unwillingness of smaller parties to form a coalition. However, two-partism gave way in Nigeria following the 2023 Presidential election when three parties garnered substantial votes. This paper explains the concepts of two-partism based on the prism of the domination of two political parties in an election rather than an explanation that is based on the involvement of just two parties in an election. It relates the concept to the Nigerian Presidential elections that were conducted between 1999 and 2019 and why the trajectory changed in the 2023 election.

Could vote buying be socially desirable? Exploratory analyses of a ‘failed’ list experiment

List experiments encourage survey respondents to report sensitive opinions they may prefer not to reveal. But, studies sometimes find that respondents admit more readily to sensitive opinions when asked directly. Often this over-reporting is viewed as a design failure, attributable to inattentiveness or other nonstrategic error. This paper conducts an exploratory analysis of such a ‘failed’ list experiment measuring vote buying in the 2019 Nigerian presidential election. We take this opportunity to explore our assumptions about vote buying. Although vote buying is illegal and stigmatized in many countries, a significant literature links such exchanges to patron-client networks that are imbued with trust, reciprocity and long-standing benefits, which might create incentives for individuals to claim having been offered to participate in vote buying. Submitting our data to a series of tests of design, we find that over-reporting is strategic: respondents intentionally reveal vote buying and it’s likely that those who reveal vote buying have in fact being offered to participate in vote buying. Considering reasons for over-reporting such as social desirability and network benefits, and the strategic nature of over-reporting, we suggest that “design failure" is not the only possible conclusion from unexpected list experiment results. With this paper we show that our theoretical assumptions about sensitivity bias affect the conclusions we can draw from a list experiment.

Political digital advertising: implications and way forward for Nigeria’s 2023 general elections

This study looked at the Digital Political Advertising: Implications and Way forward for Nigeria's 2023 General Elections. The objectives of the study were to examine the extent of digital media advertising in the 2023 general election; find out the effectiveness of digital media political advertising on Benin City residents’ choice of 2023 presidential candidates in Nigeria; find out the factors (if any), which hinder the effective use of the digital media advertising for the 2023 presidential election and x-ray the ways forward to the impediments of digital advertising usage in the 2023 Nigerian presidential election. The theoretical framework was Cultivation theory and survey served as research instrument. The study found that digital advertising has come to stay and that amidst it is being extensively used by political stakeholders in projecting the agenda and ideologies of the political contenders in the 2023 general elections in Nigeria. As such, political digital advertising cannot be jettisoned by any political party or stakeholders who wish to effectively sell their ideologies irrespective of the presence of traditional and media advertising. It was recommended that political parties and stakeholders who are yet to adopt digital advertising should do so as it has various higher imperatives over traditional political advertising. It was also recommended that political parties and stakeholders who are using digital advertising as their only advertising method should complement their efforts using traditional media in order to get a higher reach especially from political stakeholders who do not have digital advertising reception gadgets.

Likely scenarios of the aftermath of Nigerian's Presidential Election 2023 and its impact on the sub-region

Likely scenarios of the aftermath of Nigerian's Presidential Election 2023 and its impact on the sub-region

Likely scenarios of the aftermath of Nigerian's Presidential Election 2023 and its impact on the sub-region

Likely scenarios of the aftermath of Nigerian's Presidential Election 2023 and its impact on the sub-region

Analyzing Public Sentiment and Acceptance of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System in Nigeria using Sentiment Analysis and RoBERTa Model

The research article investigates the satisfaction of voters with the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) in the 2023 Nigerian presidential election by conducting a sentiment analysis of Twitter posts. The article aims to analyze public opinion and sentiment towards the BVAS system and provide valuable insights that can inform policy decisions and actions related to the implementation and improvement of the system. In this study, Twitter posts related to BVAS and the election were collected using the Twitter streaming API. A total of 997,400 tweets were obtained. The data preprocessing phase involved cleaning the tweets by removing noise, filtering out irrelevant comments, and segmenting the text into words or phrases. The sentiment analysis itself was conducted using the Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach (ROBERTa), which is a language model introduced by Facebook AI. ROBERTa is a powerful model for sequence modeling and is optimized for sentiment analysis. It predicts the sentiment of each tweet as either positive or negative. This study reveals that attitudes toward the employment of BVAS in the Nigerian presidential election of 2023 are neutral, the acceptance rate is low compared to the rejection rate. Although, there is a large percentage of people who are unfavorable to the introduction of this technology. The study utilized Twitter data exclusively for sentiment analysis, which may limit its accuracy in representing the sentiments of the entire population. Twitter users may not be a fully representative sample and could introduce biases. Additionally, the sentiment analysis focused on English tweets only, potentially overlooking sentiments expressed in other languages spoken in Nigeria, like Hausa, Yoruba, or Igbo. To achieve a more comprehensive analysis, future research could expand to include sentiment analysis of tweets in different languages.

Social media disinformation and voting decisions during 2019 presidential elections in Nigeria

Social media spread disinformation due to their characteristic features of anonymity and ease of producing, accessing, forwarding, and replicating media contents. Although studies have analyzed the influence of disinformation on voter choices, little is known about the false information that went viral on social media during the 2019 Nigerian presidential elections and its influence on voting decisions. Accordingly, the study identified social media disinformation about Muhammadu Buhari (All Progressives Congress) and Atiku Abubakar (Peoples Democratic Party), and its influence on voting decisions. Content analysis of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube posts revealed 10 viral pieces of disinformation about the contestants. Although the messages looked authentic because of their attribution, they were tagged false by independent fact checkers and disclaimers. They were also ascribed as false by survey respondents. Despite their presence, the information had little influence on voting decisions. While Facebook is the most used social media platform (48.6%), Twitter (60%) is the core channel of political disinformation. Posts used multiple story formats and information sources to make claims appear real. A combination of text, video, and picture was used for the political messaging, with pictures accompanying most stories for emphasis and message authentication. Each news story had more than 2000 likes and shares, which has implications for the continuous spread of false information.

The 2019 Nigerian presidential elections and the resurgence of the magic bullet theory of media effect

This study examined the continued relevance of Magic Bullet Theory, also called Hypodermic Needle Theory. It adopted the applied and survey research methods. The sample had 1,265 respondents. Qualitative analytical approach was used to discuss how the Magic Bullet Theory has remained a relevant interpretative tool for assessing the behaviour of media audiences during election period. Theoretical framework was anchored on Tichenor, Donohue and Olien’s Knowledge Gap Theory. The paper argued that the impactful use of media propaganda (particularly fake news on social media) during Nigeria’s 2019 elections has demonstrated the continued relevance of the theory in media studies, especially as it was observed that members of the main competing parties and aides of election contestants used fake news on social media to influence voters’ electoral judgments. Internet-based rumours of President Muhammadu Buhari’s demise and his “Islamisation” agenda, for instance, created such great concern that his party, the All Progressive Congress, exerted much efforts during its campaigns to debunk these allegations. Findings from the study led to the conclusion that media content substantially influenced the voters’ choice on who to support; and this vividly showed in the party’s dismal electoral performance in the Christian-dominated South-East, South-South and North-Central geo-political zones.

Critical sociocognitive analysis of hate speech in the 2015 Nigerian presidential election campaigns

Abstract In an attempt to ensure electoral victory, politicians use different strategies. One of such is resort to hate speech to discredit the opponents. The 2015 presidential election campaigns in Nigeria witnessed unrestrained use of hate speech in different media. This paper analysed selected speeches of the campaign organisations of the two leading political parties in the election, namely the Peoples Democratic Party Presidential Campaign Organisation and the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Organisation. Data were got from the speeches and advertorials of the two organisations sampled from The Nation and The Punch, published between January and March 2015. The speeches were subjected to critical sociocognitive analysis. The antecedents of the candidates became a recipe for hate speech. Propagandist and alarmist ideologies were used. Socially shared knowledge played an important role in the hate speech. Figures were used symbolically and serious attempts were made to frighten the electorate.

Rurality and Party System Fragmentation in the Nigerian Presidential Elections of the Fourth Republic

AbstractThis paper examines the effect of rurality on party system fragmentation in the Nigerian presidential elections of the fourth republic. The findings show that party system fragmentation (PSF) has been characteristically low in the Nigerian presidential elections and rurality does not significantly predict party system fragmentation. Rurality has a negative effect on PSF in all the elections studied except the 2003 election but only significant in the 2011 poll. Thus, the paper cast doubt on previous studies that indicate that striking rural-urban differences manifest in party system fragmentation in African elections and attribute it to previous studies’ measure of rurality. The paper argues that the use of a composite measure of rurality instead of singular measures of rurality might provide better analysis that helps us understand the effect of rurality on party systems. Also, it argues that in the study of the rural-urban difference in voting behaviour or political behaviours more broadly, data should be aggregated based on cities and non-city areas because cities have distinctive urban characters compared with non-city places. Analyses done on states or constituencies level may not reveal the rural-urban difference because states and constituencies usually have a mix of rural and urban population and other characteristics.

The Factors Determining Voter Turnouts in Presidential Elections in Nigeria: Multivariate Correlation Analysis of the 2019 Presidential Election

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.

Framing of the 2019 Nigerian presidential election in Alaroye Newspaper

Framing of the 2019 Nigerian presidential election in Alaroye Newspaper

The 2019 Presidential Election in Nigeria: An analysis of the voting pattern, issues and impact

The 2019 Presidential Election is one of the most keenly and closely contested in the history of Nigerian Presidential Elections since the colonial and post-independence period. The election was heralded with tensions, accusations and counter-accusations, intense campaign, trade of blames by the ruling and major opposition parties and other related issues. This study examined the process of the conduct of the 2019 Presidential Election, the outcome and analysis of the voting pattern and its implications. The work adopted both primary and secondary sources of data. The primary source is the direct participant observation where the author was part of the process of the election as a collation officer for the Presidential Election in one of the local governments in Nigeria. The research also observed directly on a live broadcast the presentation of the results by the state returning officers where the results were collected and used for analysis. The secondary sources include the use of books, journals and internet sources. The data obtained was presented in a thematic form using tables and statistical interpretations. The research discovered that the outcome of the 2019 General Election continued to reflect the voting pattern in Nigeria where ethno-religious and regional affiliations determine how the electorates choose their President even though, the two major contenders this time emerged from the same region unlike the previous situations. The research recommends that there is a need for massive enlightenment among the electorates towards choice of leaders based on performance and not sentiments. Keywords : analysis, election, politics, president, Presidential Election, voting pattern

Religion and Voter Choice Homogeneity in the Nigerian Presidential Elections of the Fourth Republic

AbstractThis article examines the influence of religion on voter choice homogeneity (VCH) in the Nigerian presidential elections of the fourth republic (1999–2015). The result indicates that in the first two elections, religion did not have a significant impact on VCH but had increasing influence from 2011. Thus, compared with the 1999 and 2003 elections, the effect of faith in 2011 and 2015 elections was positive, but the impact of religion was highest in 2015, having a significant and robust effect on VCH. Thus, the paper demonstrates that impact of faith in the presidential elections in the fourth republic has strengthened over time. This finding is, however, put in the context of each election regarding the role of candidates’ popularity, party-identification, ethnicity, candidates’ performance, the number of candidates contesting the election and the position of prominent leaders of the different regions of the country. The paper demonstrates that placing the influence of religion on vote choice in the context of each election and place-specific manifestation of VCH is pertinent in understanding better how religion shapes voting behaviour in Nigeria.

The spatial pattern of voter choice homogeneity in the Nigerian presidential elections of the fourth republic

Abstract The return of democratic rule in 1999 after many years of military intervention has left some electoral geographic imprints on Nigeria: voting pattern has varied over this period. This paper analyses the pattern of voter choice homogeneity (VCH) and tests the effect of religion on VCH in the presidential elections of the fourth Nigerian republic from 1999 to 2015. The study found that some economic indicators have a positive and significant effect on VCH from the 2003 election but were all insignificant and with a negative impact in the 2015 election. The influence of religion on VCH was negative in the 1999 election but remained positive in subsequent elections and had an increasingly upward trajectory signifying the snowballing importance of faith in citizens’ political choices at the presidential polls. The analysis shows that the pattern of VCH in 1999 was random, but clustered from 2003 to 2015, although the 2011 geographical clustering of VCH was dissected and the 2015 pattern was regionalised. Thus, the article argues that voting patterns structured Nigeria’s political landscape from a random to clustered but dissected electoral landscapes to a clustered but regionalised mi-lieu of a nation of two voting worlds. The pattern of a nation of two voting blocs was witnessed in the 2015 election, in which the VCH sharply depicts the religious cleavage of the country and to some degree also depicts ethnic fault-lines.