Electoral Authoritarianism and the Incumbent Advantage in Nigerian Governorship Elections: A Systematic Analysis

This study advances a systematic empirical and theoretical analysis of electoral authoritarianism as practised by incumbent governors in Nigerian states, investigating the mechanisms through which incumbents manufacture electoral advantages that undermine competitive electoral integrity while maintaining the formal appearances of democratic process. Electoral authoritarianism within sub-national democratic systems represents a distinctive governance pathology in which the tools of state power are systematically deployed to ensure incumbent electoral success, creating a de facto single-party governance environment within a nominally democratic framework. Drawing on the electoral authoritarianism literature of Schedler and colleagues, the comparative state politics tradition, and the African elections literature, the study develops an original typology of subnational incumbent advantage mechanisms in Nigerian governorship elections. An original dataset is constructed by coding electoral competitiveness, state resource deployment patterns, security force conduct during elections, judicial intervention rates, and election observer assessments for all 36 state governorship elections between 2015 and 2023. Regression analysis identifies the variables most strongly predictive of incumbent electoral success, while qualitative comparative analysis isolates the mechanisms associated with particularly uncompetitive electoral outcomes. The study finds that the combination of security force cooperation with incumbents, partisan judicial appointments, and opposition party financing restrictions produces the most severe constraints on electoral competition in specific states across multiple geopolitical zones. Original contributions include the subnational electoral authoritarianism typology and the first systematic cross-state quantitative analysis of incumbent advantages in Nigerian governorship elections. Keywords: electoral authoritarianism, incumbent advantage, governorship elections, Nigeria, subnational politics