Authoritarian Resilience and Democratic Backsliding in Nigeria: An Analysis of Elite Bargaining, 1999 to 2023

This study empirically analyses the mechanisms of authoritarian resilience and democratic backsliding within Nigeria's formally democratic political system from 1999 to 2023, examining how elite bargaining processes, institutional manipulation, and patronage network maintenance have prevented the consolidation of substantive democratic governance despite two decades of uninterrupted electoral cycles. The concept of authoritarian resilience has been developed primarily in the context of openly authoritarian regimes, yet Nigeria presents the analytically challenging case of a formally democratic system in which authoritarian governance practices persist within democratic institutional shells. A mixed-methods design is employed, combining quantitative analysis of democratic quality indicators including Freedom House and Varieties of Democracy scores from 1999 to 2023 with qualitative process tracing of three critical episodes of democratic backsliding, including the 2015 and 2023 election management controversies and the June 2021 Twitter ban. Forty-five elite interviews with politicians, civil society leaders, and constitutional scholars from across all geopolitical zones supplement the quantitative evidence. The Democratic Backsliding Theory and the Authoritarian Resilience Framework by Levitsky and Way provide the theoretical anchors. Findings confirm a pattern of competitive authoritarianism in which elections are held but incumbents systematically manipulate institutional rules to reduce meaningful political competition. Keywords: authoritarian resilience, democratic backsliding, Nigeria, elite bargaining, competitive authoritarianism.