Party institutionalization and ideological delineation

On formal drivers of party switching, while scholars such as Klein (Reference Klein2019), Kreuzer and Pettai (Reference Kreuzer, Pettai, Heller and Mershon2008) argue that the lack of institutionalization of political parties is a major driver of party defection, defining party institutionalization itself is another contested issue. According to Huntington (Reference Huntington1968: 12), ‘[i]nstitutionalization is the process by which organizations and procedures acquire value and stability’, with four major dimensions – adaptability, complexity, autonomy and coherence. Mainwaring (Reference Mainwaring1999) defines party institutionalization not only as the extent of ideological polarity among political parties, as Sartori (Reference Sartori1976) before him emphasized, but as the presence of established party practices and principles that shape the activities of members and ensure stability over time. Mainwaring further states that institutionalized parties are often longstanding, with solid roots in and links to society, thereby improving their representative legitimacy.

If we consider the particular assessment of the general performance of political parties in Africa with these indicators, such parties have often been described as weak, formless and lacking in representation (Bayart Reference Bayart1993; Manning Reference Manning2005; Sartori Reference Sartori1976). Sartori (Reference Sartori1976: 244) described postcolonial African parties as ‘formless polities’, while Bayart (Reference Bayart1993) portrayed them as unrepresentative and composed of co-opted political elites detached from the people. Even after the so-called third wave of democratization in the 1990s, which witnessed the transition of several African states from one-party states or military dictatorships to multiparty competitions, van de Walle (Reference van de Walle2003; Reference van de Walle, Herbert and Wilkinson2007) and Manning (Reference Manning2005) have lamented how obstructive factors have markedly diverted the consolidation of parties in Africa. Such factors include personalistic and ethnic politics as well as clientelism, where private goods are gifted to targeted groups based on ethnic ties or informal relationships in return for political support rather than the provision of public goods. Tetzlaff (Reference Tetzlaff2002) and Mbah (Reference Mbah2011) likewise claim that parties in Africa are simply vehicles used by political entrepreneurs and elites to attain power, and are less about representing the different groups in society.

Conversely, I admit the familiar issues and obstacles of clientelism and ethnic politics, but argue that labelling African parties as weakly institutionalized is reductionistic, as many of them have roots in society with clear party structures. Similarly, Riedl (Reference Riedl2014) returned to old indicators of institutionalization (stability, roots in society, legitimacy and party organization) as proposed by Sartori (Reference Sartori1976) and Mainwaring (Reference Mainwaring1999), but found variations within and among African states. In other words, she discovered that Africa is composed of political parties with different levels of institutionalization. LeBas (Reference LeBas2011) confirms this variation among African parties, and traces it to interactions between opposition groups and pre-democratic regimes. Therefore, I side with scholars who argue that using a broad brush across the continent to paint it as composed of weakly institutionalized parties is oversimplistic and lacks empirical grounding.

In addition, it is difficult to wave aside political parties in Nigeria as weakly institutionalized since most of them at least have clear structures and modes of operation. In fact, before a political party is registered in Nigeria, it is expected to meet some key criteria including submitting to the electoral commission a draft of the party constitution, code of conduct, manifesto and office addresses; this applies in at least twenty-four of the thirty-six states in the country (INEC 2014). The electoral commission also has the power to deregister parties that fail to win any seat at the local government, state or national level. This is aimed at ensuring that existing parties have public recognition and roots in society by virtue of winning elections. Additionally, despite irregularities in some of their electoral successes, the APC and PDP dominate the news cycle both during and outside election season, evidence of their visibility and name recognition. Nonetheless, Nigerian parties generally lack ideological clarity, which could have helped to better demarcate parties from one another and to provide different policy and ideological alternatives to the public. So, it could be argued that Nigerian parties have structures but are deficient in ideological clarity.

This, however, was not always the case. Parties in Nigeria’s first republic shortly after independence showed signs of ideological polarities. While Action Group (AG), a pre-independence party based in the western region, showed signs of progressive politics and had a strong mass education agenda, the Northern People’s Congress comprised core conservative Muslim politicians with different visions for the country (Abegunrin Reference Abegunrin2015). Admittedly, these were largely ethnic parties and struggled to win elections outside their core ethnic base. The ethnic tensions and ideological polarity among them undoubtedly heated up the polity of the newly independent country, which eventually succumbed to a civil war seven years after independence. While the war is often attributed to the horizontal inequalities experienced by the Igbos in eastern Nigeria, the failed attempted multiparty alliance and massive election irregularities orchestrated by party operatives contributed to this sense of chaos, lack of solidarity and military coups before the war (Kirk-Greene Reference Kirk-Greene1975). In my interviews for this research, one Nigerian researcher argued that, while the parties in the first republic were better demarcated than the parties in the present fourth republic, political violence – which culminated in a civil war – was more common then than now.Footnote ³ The parties in the brief second and third republics were weak copies of those of the first and showed signs of ebbing ideological clarity for the sake of broader national appeals. So, the price paid for the present parties’ national outreach was a move from ideological and ethnic polarization to catch-all parties that lack ideological demarcations (Bogaards Reference Bogaards2010). In fact, the present Nigerian constitution prohibits the formation of parties along ethnic or religious cleavages,Footnote ⁴ and it seems that ideological preferences among parties have also been lost in the process.

This move to catch-all parties for the sake of national peace and stability has far-reaching effects on party defection, as switching could become more frequent when parties become less ideologically demarcated. This lack of demarcation enables legislators to switch parties without incurring any significant ideological incompatibility with the new party since there is no clear party differentiation in the first place. Klein (Reference Klein2019) generally observes that, because of the distinct ideological standings of many western parties, switchers are likely to find their new party ideologically incompatible. Klein also comments on the transactional cost of switching parties in ideological settings, where switching could be interpreted as a sign of political betrayal of those voters who supported the switchers because of the ideological position of the former party, a costly move for re-election. It would therefore take a significant ideological or policy shift, often following consultation with their electoral base, for legislators in ideological party settings to switch. This seems to imply that in a case with no ideological difference, as in Nigeria, voters would not mind if MPs switched since the parties are the same ideologically. But despite this lack of ideological polarization, I contend that Nigerian parties still have core attributes that distinguish one from another, one of which is party legacy. The two major parties in Nigeria, the PDP and the APC, have both won control of the federal government (PDP for sixteen years, APC for more than eight), and Nigerians can now compare the performances of both parties. In addition, despite the relative nationwide popularity of these parties, they still have their strongholds where they dominate, with the APC more popular in the north while the PDP often takes the south. This might not be unconnected to the fact that, since the return to multiparty democracy in 1999, the APC has produced a northern president and one from the south, while the PDP has produced two presidents from the southern part of the country, making the PDP stronger in the south by virtue of ethnic/identity politics, and the APC in the north. So, when an MP switches from a party in its stronghold, it is expected that voters will mind.

This idea of party core, which does not necessarily constitute ideological delineations among parties, has been discussed by other scholars of African politics. Bob-Milliar (Reference Bob-Milliar2012) points out the boundaries between the two major parties in Ghana in what he calls ‘founding mythology’, and shows how this guides party mobilization strategies and representation. Bertrand (Reference Bertrand2020) refers to these as historical values and party cores that enable African parties to mobilize support and endure over time, drawing from her research in Burkina Faso and Uganda. LeBas (Reference LeBas2011) makes a case for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a political party in Zimbabwe with strong roots in the country’s trade unions, and Riedl (Reference Riedl2014) discusses the sentimental appeals of parties in Senegal. There have been attempts to categorize parties in Nigeria as either market- or state-oriented, as Obe (Reference Obe2019) and some public analysts in Nigeria have tried to do,Footnote ⁵ but this has been dismissed more vigorously by another set of Nigerian researchers and analysts, and even by politicians themselves, as a forced categorization of the catch-all parties in Nigeria.Footnote ⁶ These debates suggest that, despite the ideological convergence among African parties, they still possess party cores that distinguish them.

This absence of ideological delineation is related to the valence issues raised by Bleck and van de Walle (Reference Bleck and van de Walle2013) – that parties in sub-Saharan Africa have similar policy preferences. They argue that most political parties, both ruling and opposition parties, agree on the primacy of certain issues such as employment, security and education, but they often avoid issues that require unequivocal ideological commitment because of uncertainties. Instead of taking opposing ideological positions, parties adopt similar policy preferences but argue among themselves on who is best positioned to deliver, pointing to their past achievements in either their private businesses or previous political office. In their words, ‘the absence of economic ideological debate should not be confused for a dearth of programmatic politics … political parties do invoke salient political issues – but usually through valence appeals, rather than by taking positions’ (ibid.: 1395). Interestingly, they further observe that appealing to those valence issues that do not require rigid ideological positions makes it easier for politicians to switch political allegiance with ease. ‘Valence issues around which there is broad consensus,’ they reveal, ‘offer a safer strategy for politicians who may be considering switching parties or alliances in the near future’ (ibid.: 1398). I proffer that this prevalence of valence appeals in African parties seems to offer a better explanation for switching than the argument of weakly institutionalized parties, since, as discussed earlier, many African parties have structures and public support, factors that constitute features of institutionalized parties, but the lack of ideological delineation among Nigerian parties could make switchers feel less out of place after they defect. So, the issue of lack of ideological clarity in Nigerian political parties should be disentangled from the general argument of lack of party institutionalization, which might not apply.

Anti-defection laws

Another issue raised by existing literature on party switching is the absence or weak enforcement of anti-defection laws. Desposato (Reference Desposato2006) discusses the presence or absence of punitive measures against party defection as another determinant of the occurrence of switching. In other words, states that have laws and regulations against party switching are likely to experience fewer defections. However, Steytler (Reference Steytler1997) reveals that longstanding democracies such as the USA and the UK have no anti-defection laws but experience fewer incidents of switching compared with several late democracies that have tough rules but, ironically, higher numbers of defections. This could be a result of the ideological polarization among parties in these countries, which makes switching rare, as opposed to the ideological convergence found in newer democracies such as in Africa. Furthermore, Blunt (Reference Blunt1964) observes that, in spite of the presence of anti-defection laws, MPs in Nigeria have been able to find loopholes to avoid sanctions. For instance, party switching is often not prosecuted because ‘the parties would support the prohibition of carpet-crossing when their members were being enticed away to other parties but would oppose it in the reverse circumstances’ (Blunt Reference Blunt1964: 90). Still, in Nigeria, the loopholes in sections 68(1)(g) and 109(1) of the Nigerian constitution, which mandate MPs to relinquish their seat after defecting but permit defection in times of party mergers and significant party division, have effectively been exploited by Nigerian legislators (Fashagba Reference Fashagba2014; Ikechukwu Reference Ikechukwu2015; Nwanegbo et al. Reference Nwanegbo, Odigbo and Nnorom2014). Ikechukwu (Reference Ikechukwu2015: 80) describes this equivocation in the Nigerian constitution as ‘an escape route for politicians to cross-carpet since there are always divisions within the political parties’.

Giving that both the PDP and the APC have benefited (and suffered) from these defections, it is difficult to imagine that they would seek court injunctions to compel switchers to vacate their seats. Both parties have accommodated defectors, often offering incentives for legislators to defect. According to Awofeso and Irabor (Reference Awofeso and Irabor2016: 37), ‘the then ruling PDP [in 2014–15] was said to have promised US$2 million to each senator who returns to the PDP, US$1 million to each member of the House of Representatives and US$10 million to each “leader” who abandoned the APC for the PDP’.

I have observed that, until recently, it was only private individuals – usually political opponents of the defectors – or civil society groups who sought rulings from the court on the issue of party switching. In May 2012, a member of the House of Representatives, Ifedayo Abegunde, representing Akure North/Akure South federal constituency, was forced to relinquish his seat after a federal high court sacked him for switching from the Labour Party to the Action Congress of Nigeria.Footnote ⁷ The court ruled that there were no significant party crises or mergers in the Labour Party that would have justified switching according to the 1999 Nigerian constitution. This case, which eventually made its way to the Supreme Court of Nigeria, ended with the same judgment: the justices ruled that Ifedayo Abegunde’s defection warranted the relinquishing of his seat in the House of Representatives. This case was filed by a political opponent of the defendant as opposed to one of Nigeria’s political parties.

In April 2019, another federal court sacked Senator Sonni Ogbuoji for defecting from the PDP to the APC and ordered him to refund all salaries and allowances received after switching after some of his political rivals dragged him to court.Footnote ⁸ Nonetheless, by the time the judgment was made, Senator Ogbuoji had already left the Senate and was gunning for the governor’s mansion. Although there were other cases of courts sacking defecting MPs in state legislatures, the majority of switchers – especially in the federal legislature – retained their seats and emerged unscathed. In another case from 2018–19, an NGO under the aegis of the Legal Defence and Assistance Project (LEDAP) sued fifty-four legislators who switched parties without vacating their seats between 2014 and 2018. However, the federal high court in Abuja dismissed the case due to technicalities. While the judge conceded that the legislators had acted against the constitution, he stated that LEDAP was the wrong plaintiff.Footnote ⁹ In other words, the legislators would have been found guilty if the case had been brought by their respective former parties and not the NGO.

I also suggest that timing could be a major issue here, as the majority of switching in the National Assembly in 2014–15 and 2018–19 occurred a few months before the general elections. This implies that the electorates, instead of the courts, were left to judge through their votes whether they approved of those defections that occurred close to elections. In the cases of Ifedayo Abegunde and Senator Sonni Ogbuoji, they both switched outside the election period. Awofeso and Irabor (Reference Awofeso and Irabor2016) reveal that, within a year of the 2015 election, five state governors, eleven PDP senators and thirty-seven members of the House of Representatives defected in the same month. And in 2018, another thirty-seven members of the House of Representatives (not necessarily the same MPs) and fifteen senators defected on the same day about six months before the 2019 election.Footnote ¹⁰ Nigerian political parties have often shown more interest in litigating defections when they occur outside the election season. More recently, the PDP sued the former speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, who switched to the party before the 2019 election and then returned to the APC a year after winning the election.Footnote ¹¹ In a case pending in court, the PDP asked for the sacking of the former speaker in line with the anti-defection laws in the constitution. Yet another case is pending in court in which the PDP has sued three senators from Zamfara State who switched parties a few months after winning their elections on its platform.Footnote ¹² The party would have probably reacted differently if the defections had occurred close to an election – it would have condemned the switching but would not have litigated it, leaving voters to make their own judgement in the imminent polls.

Party leadership and party defections

Heller and Mershon (Reference Heller and Mershon2008b: 32) note that ‘the wider the array of tools available to party leaders for disciplining their rank and file, in general, the fewer incentives individual MPs have to buck their party line (because it is likely to be more costly in the end)’. However, they caution that when parties become too restrictive, MPs are forced to devise exit options. So, they theorize that party discipline has a curvilinear relationship with switching. Similarly, Nielsen et al. (Reference Nielsen, Andersen and Pedersen2019) observe that defection could help check the excesses and highhandedness of party leaders, forcing them to take on board the concerns of the electorate and those of their members simultaneously. Nielsen et al. (ibid.: 43) further comment that ‘[i]t may also reflect situations in which the party leadership makes decisions that contradict the party manifesto’, and so ‘legislators therefore decide to leave their party to stay loyal to their voters’. This issue of the culpability of party leaders in the wave of defections, especially in Nigeria, has largely been understudied. While most accusing fingers point to MPs who jump ship, the same criticisms are rarely levelled against party leaders, who in some cases either provoke MPs to switch or open the doors for switchers to jump in. In the interviews and media report analysis I conducted for this research, several defecting MPs pointed to the lack of internal democracy in Nigerian parties, exemplified by unfair candidate selection processes.Footnote ¹³ The wave of defections from the PDP to the APC before the 2015 election was greatly influenced by aggrieved MPs who disputed the party’s candidate selection process (Owen and Usman Reference Owen and Usman2015).

President Goodluck Jonathan wanted to run for another term in office in 2015 after completing the term of late President Yar’Adua in 2011 and another four years from 2011 to 2014. While this was constitutional and supported by the courts, many politicians, especially those from the north, saw this as a breach of the power rotation agreement in the PDP constitution and a ploy to perpetuate a southerner in power. With the use of presidential influence, Jonathan succeeded in winning over the party executives and emerged as the top PDP candidate for the 2015 presidential election. This led to internal party squabbles and, eventually, the switching of at least eleven senators and thirty-seven members of the House of Representatives from the PDP to the APC (Owen and Usman Reference Owen and Usman2015). The switchers, many of whom had presidential ambitions, blamed their move on party executives who failed to take their concerns seriously and who were heavily under the influence of the president. This massive movement out of the PDP forced the party chairman to resign,Footnote ¹⁴ but the damage had already been done – the PDP lost the presidential election and control of the National Assembly to the APC.

In the months leading up to the 2019 election, switchers who moved from the ruling APC to the PDP (the opposite of what happened in 2015) once again pointed accusing fingers to presidential interference in the candidate selection process and highhanded party executives. The then speaker of the house, Yakubu Dogara, raised similar concerns that he would not pander to the APC party leadership to obtain a ticket to contest the elections. ‘They said they would give me a ticket in the APC,’ he stated, ‘but that I must go and beg for it. I said I did not need the ticket. In politics, I have never gone to anybody’s house to beg for a ticket.’Footnote ¹⁵ Likewise, the APC chairman at the time, Adams Oshiomhole, was accused of manipulating party primaries to suit those who paid homage to him. Former Senate president Bukola Saraki accused him thus: ‘Oshiomhole is somebody who has been told to have been collecting not even naira but dollars from candidates and he is being accused by his party’s aspirants and governors.’Footnote ¹⁶ The shambolic primaries held by the APC were the subject of several lawsuits before and after the election. In fact, the Supreme Court barred the APC from fielding candidates in Zamfara and Rivers States in the 2019 gubernatorial and federal legislative elections due to lack of transparency in party primaries.

Interestingly, this issue of controversial primaries often plagues the ruling party more than the opposition parties in Nigeria; the PDP, the ruling party before the 2015 elections, was hit with candidate selection squabbles, while the APC plunged into a similar position as the ruling party before the 2019 elections. I argue that, while the ruling party is often an attractive option for politicians because of its power of incumbency, fierce intraparty competition for the party ticket exposes the party to internal squabbles, which boil over into the defection of disgruntled members. This was the case for the PDP a few months before the 2015 elections, and for the APC ahead of the 2019 elections. In fact, both parties, by virtue of their popularity and the benefits and access to power that they provide, often suffer from intra-elite squabbles over party tickets and leadership positions.

Beyond the scenarios noted above, politicians have continued to lament the political interference of the presidency and state governors as well as compromised party leaders. Three former MPs and one gubernatorial candidate whom I interviewed for this research recounted how they lost their positions because ‘Abuja’ or the governor of their state preferred another candidate, compelling them eventually to switch parties.Footnote ¹⁷ Since the electoral act permits either direct or indirect primaries, party leaders have been accused of selecting the option that best suits their preferred candidates. ‘All manner of mechanism [sic] are crafted to thwart democratic processes especially in the choice of candidates for elective positions,’ Obianyo et al. (Reference Obianyo, Ikenna and Ernest2022: 22) lament, ‘ranging from exorbitant fees for would be contestants, national executives veto power to nullify primaries, impose candidates or disqualify candidates with winning potentials.’

In the same vein, the electoral commission revealed that 890 (53.35 per cent) out of 1,689 court cases arising from the 2019 general elections were based on pre-election matters, particularly disputed party primaries.Footnote ¹⁸ The APC chairman was eventually forced out of office because of his abysmal performance, including in the shambolic primaries, and his dwindling support in the party. So, while the discourse on party switching in Nigeria has often been framed as opportunistic politicians changing party affiliations with reckless abandon (Blunt Reference Blunt1964; Fashagba Reference Fashagba2014; Okeke et al. Reference Okeke, Okechukwu and Onyebuchi2019), this issue of problematic party executives, their interference in the internal candidate selection process and its effects on party switching has not been adequately addressed until now. The curvilinear relationship between party discipline as enforced by party leaders and party switching, as discussed by Heller and Mershon (Reference Heller, Mershon, Heller and Mershon2008a), rings true in the Nigerian case, and this shows the value of bringing in different viewpoints, with the phenomenon also viewed from the perspective of switchers themselves. This insight into internal party wranglings has often slipped through the net in previous theorizations on the drivers of party switching because many researchers have shunned talking to politicians directly or considering their perspective.