International records / OpenAlex research

Party Defection and the Crisis of Democratic Consolidation in Nigeria’s Second Republic

This article interrogates the phenomenon of party defection as a critical impediment to democratic consolidation during Nigeria’s Second Republic (1979–1983). The democratic experiment after thirteen years of military rule was characterized by intense political competition, weak party institutionalization, electoral disputes, political opportunism, and struggles for power among political elites. This resulted to the enticement that prompted military intervention which truncated the regime. A vacuum occurred with insufficient attention paid to the endogenous political dynamics that rendered civ…