Gender, Power, and Policy: A Feminist Institutionalist Analysis of Women’s Political Representation in Nigeria (1999-2024)

This study develops an original feminist institutionalist analysis of women's political representation in Nigeria from 1999 to 2024, explaining the persistent gap between constitutional equality provisions and actual female legislative presence, and generating a theoretically grounded policy reform agenda. Despite 25 years of multiparty democracy, Nigeria's female legislative representation rate remains among the lowest in the world, and existing institutional and sociological explanations provide only partial accounts of this failure. Drawing on feminist institutionalism, gender and politics theory, and recent African women's representation literature from 2019 to 2024, the study employs a critical qualitative research design integrating feminist political ethnography and institutionalist analysis. Primary data are gathered through 75 elite interviews with female legislators, party gatekeepers, women's movement leaders, electoral management officials, and gender policy experts drawn from all six geopolitical zones. Legislative records, party primary data, and electoral financial disclosure documents are subjected to documentary analysis. Feminist discourse analysis and process tracing are applied. The study's theoretical contribution is the Gendered Institutional Exclusion Framework, which identifies four institutional mechanisms: party internal gatekeeping, informal network exclusion, resource asymmetry lock-in, and cultural norm institutionalisation, as co-producing persistent female underrepresentation through mutually reinforcing institutional dynamics. This framework advances beyond descriptive approaches and generates theoretically specified institutional reform entry points. Findings contribute original knowledge to feminist political science, institutional theory, and Nigerian gender policy. Keywords: women's representation, feminist institutionalism, political parties, Nigeria, gender policy