Political Communication and Governance in Nigeria’s Off-Cycle Elections: A Comparative Study of Osun 2022 and 2026

Abstract

Nigeria’s off-cycle governorship elections are routinely described as test cases for electoral administration, yet little work compares successive contests in the same state or asks how the communication surrounding them shapes their legitimacy. This study compares the Osun governorship elections of 16 July 2022 and 15 August 2026 through a convergent parallel mixed-methods design. The quantitative strand combines the officially declared results of both elections with process indicators reported by independent observers (Yiaga Africa, the Nigeria Civil Society Situation Room and the Centre for Democracy and Development). The qualitative strand is a thematic and frequency-based content analysis of a purposive corpus of 20 public documents (9 for 2022; 11 for 2026) comprising observer statements, civil-society reports, candidate and party communication, and press analysis, coded against seven themes. The two strands were merged through a joint display. Turnout (accredited voters as a share of registered voters) moved only from 42.4 per cent to 43.2 per cent, the winning margin widened from 3.5 to 6.7 percentage points of valid votes, and the rejected-ballot share fell from 2.27 to 2.06 per cent. Independent verification found the declared results consistent with parallel vote tabulation in both elections. Yet discourse about vote inducement appeared in about two-thirds of the documents in both years, and documents on technology and on institutional communication were proportionally more common in 2026, when observers also recorded a lower share of polling units with fully functional accreditation devices (80 per cent against 92 per cent). The study concludes that procedural integrity and the integrity of voter choice are communicated and contested as separate questions, and that governance legitimacy in Osun rests more on accurate counting and personal incumbency narratives than on issue-based competition. Findings are exploratory because the evidence base is documentary and unequal in size across the two elections.