Subnational Authoritarianism and Democratic Backsliding in Nigerian States: A Comparative Framework

This study develops and applies a comparative framework for analysing subnational authoritarianism within Nigeria's federal democracy, examining the conditions under which state-level governments exhibit authoritarian governance practices despite the nominally democratic character of the national political system. The phenomenon of subnational authoritarianism, in which democratically elected state governments suppress opposition, concentrate executive power, undermine judicial independence, and restrict civil liberties, has been theorised in the Latin American comparative politics literature but has received limited systematic analysis in the Nigerian context. Drawing on the comparative democratisation literature, the subnational regime theory of Gibson, and the political economy of federalism, the study constructs an original subnational authoritarianism index for all 36 Nigerian states, incorporating indicators of media freedom, judicial independence, opposition party access, civil society operating space, and legislative oversight effectiveness measured over two electoral cycles. Cluster analysis is applied to identify state-level governance types, revealing a distribution from competitive democratic to de facto single-party authoritarian across the Nigerian federation. The study then applies qualitative comparative analysis to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions associated with more authoritarian subnational governance patterns. Findings reveal that subnational authoritarianism in Nigeria is most strongly predicted by the combination of dominant party control, high oil or resource rent dependence, and weak civil society density. The study makes original theoretical contributions to the comparative federalism and democratisation literatures by introducing the concept of authoritarian enclaves within a nationally democratic federal system. Keywords: subnational authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, Nigerian states, comparative federalism, authoritarian enclaves