IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/publus/v49y2019i4p617-641..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Limits of Federation-wide Political Parties in Ensuring Federal Stability: Nigeria under the Peoples Democratic Party

Author

Listed:
  • Eyene Okpanachi

Abstract

Since Nigeria’s return to electoral rule in 1999, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) ruled the country as the majority party at both levels of its federal system until 2015. However, despite this dominance, the relationship between presidents and governors was often so divisive that the instability within the party threatened the stability of not only the ruling governments, but also the federation as a whole and undermined its productivity. This article examines this anomaly against the background of scholarship emphasizing the crucial role of federation-wide parties in fostering smooth intergovernmental bargains and in facilitating federal stability. It argues that Nigeria’s recent experience provides counterevidence of this theory and discusses the mutually reinforcing contextual factors that might have influenced this development, focusing on the PDP’s norms and the country’s intergovernmental fiscal structure.

Suggested Citation

  • Eyene Okpanachi, 2019. "The Limits of Federation-wide Political Parties in Ensuring Federal Stability: Nigeria under the Peoples Democratic Party," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, CSF Associates Inc., vol. 49(4), pages 617-641.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:49:y:2019:i:4:p:617-641.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/publius/pjy045
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Leila Demarest & Arnim Langer, 2023. "Managing Diversity in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic National Assembly: Integrated Parties versus Ethno-Regional Balancing," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, CSF Associates Inc., vol. 53(4), pages 593-617.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:49:y:2019:i:4:p:617-641.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/publius .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.