Election-Day Experiences and Evaluations of Electoral Integrity in Unconsolidated Democracies: Evidence from Nigeria

Abstract

Why do voters’ evaluations of elections in unconsolidated democracies appear to be unaffected by election-day events? Among the handful of studies that examine the consequences of election experiences in countries with less experience with multiparty elections, a majority finds that what happens on election day does not matter. I seek to reexamine this puzzle using original post-election survey data on the 2015 Nigerian presidential elections. First, I distinguish between voters’ evaluations of the process (1) at their own polling stations (local) and (2) across the entire country (national). Second, I highlight three types of election-day experiences that are relevant for unconsolidated democracies: experience with manipulation, administrative irregularities, and election observers. Multivariate regression results indicate that all three experiences are associated with local and national perceptions of electoral integrity. However, the salience of some experiences, such as interactions with election observers, depends on whether voters make local or national election integrity evaluations.

Keywords

electoral integrity electoral fraud election observation election management Nigeria

Introduction

As multiparty elections have become a nearly universal phenomenon, scholarship on democratization has found that citizens’ evaluations of the quality of elections directly influence their confidence in elected officials (Moehler, 2009), satisfaction with democratic outputs of the regime (McAllister and White, 2015; Norris, 2014), as well as the nature and scope of their political behavior beyond elections (Bratton, 2013). Notwithstanding the important consequences of citizens’ election integrity judgments for the legitimation of regimes that hold multiparty elections, scholars know relatively less about the process through which citizens formulate these attitudes toward electoral integrity.

Admittedly, the burgeoning literature on the correlates of citizens’ evaluations of election integrity has made some key advances, especially with regard to the role of citizens’ winner–loser status (Alvarez et al., 2008; Sances and Stewart, 2015) as well as the impact of electoral institutions and electoral management bodies (Birch, 2008; Bowler et al., 2015). However, one area that has received less theoretical and empirical attention is how voters’ actual experiences on election day—the focal point of the electoral process—may influence electoral integrity attitudes. This gap in the literature is even more pronounced in research conducted in regimes with less experience with multipartyism, where occurrences on election day could have deleterious consequences on voters’ democratic attitudes and subsequent political behavior.

From a theoretical perspective, there are several reasons to expect voters’ opinions of election integrity to be associated with events on election day. First, citizens’ direct involvement with the electoral process constitutes a source of information on the quality of elections. When citizens register to vote, attend campaigns, queue in long lines at the polling booth, and ultimately cast their ballot, they gain intimate knowledge of the quality of the electoral process (Birch, 2011; Elklit and Reynolds, 2002). While all stages of the electoral cycle are important, from the vantage point of voters, however, activities on election day figure very prominently. Election day represents the focal point of the electoral process. It is the one aspect of the electoral cycle, and perhaps the democratic process, when the largest proportion of a country’s citizens is directly involved either by casting ballots or assisting in election administration (Mozaffar and Schedler, 2002). It is also the one day that voters, through their collective will, have the greatest potential to influence governance and policymaking (Powell, 2000).

Moreover, research conducted in consolidated democracies, and particularly the United States, has revealed that “objective” experiences with the voting process are important predictors of voter confidence (Atkeson and Saunders, 2007). Specifically, scholars have documented how voter experiences on election day such as interactions with polling officials (Claassen et al., 2008), proper functioning of voting/ballot technology (Beaulieu, 2015), secrecy of the voting process (Karpowitz et al., 2011), and logistical issues, including the time it takes to vote (Alvarez et al., 2008), are associated with voters’ trust in the integrity of the process.

So far, a handful of studies have attempted to examine the relationship between what happens on election day and voters’ election integrity attitudes using country cases outside of consolidated democracies.¹ A majority of these studies conclude that occurrences on election day either do not matter for citizens’ electoral integrity opinions or they matter considerably less than otherwise expected. For example, Seema Shah (2015) finds that Kenyan voters’ judgments about electoral credibility were not influenced by their personal experiences with irregularities at the polling station during the 2013 presidential elections. Meanwhile, Cantú and García-Ponce (2015) conclude that the presence of observers at polling stations did not affect Mexicans’ confidence in the quality of the 2012 presidential elections. Moreover, McAllister and White (2011: 675) conclude that because only a small proportion of Russians have had an experience with electoral irregularities, “it follows that this widely sense of unfairness does not have its origin in that personal experience, but must derive from other aspects of the political system.” In sum, many of these studies contend that citizens are less self-centered when forming attitudes toward election quality. Instead, voters seemingly rely more on second-hand sources of information from political parties and the media that provide a more representative snapshot of the quality of elections within each country.

Why do voters’ evaluations of elections in unconsolidated democracies appear to be unaffected by election-day events? The absence of any consistent empirical link between personal experience and election integrity attitudes among studies conducted in unconsolidated democracies is puzzling especially given the theoretical importance of what happens on election day and the strong empirical support among studies conducted in advanced democratic regimes. One reason why studies examining this relationship are so far inconclusive is that a majority rely on a national-level measure of election quality, such as citizens’ perceptions of the “freeness and fairness” of the national elections. Compare this to most of the studies conducted in the US context that utilize a local-level measure of electoral integrity that taps into citizens’ belief that their personal ballots are accurately counted.² So it is possible that studies in the US context are more effective in unearthing the effects of election-day occurrences because they link what happens on election day to a more local evaluation of the electoral process.

The main purpose of this article is to reevaluate the process through which voters in unconsolidated democracies may rely on their personal experiences at the polls to judge the quality of elections. As a first step, I make an important conceptual distinction between voters’ local and national electoral integrity judgments with the expectation that citizens may not consistently use experiences to evaluate processes at their polling station (local evaluations) in the same way they would to evaluate the electoral process as a whole (national evaluations). Making this distinction is theoretically important as it helps to further specify the possible mechanisms linking voters’ “objective” experiences with attitudes toward electoral integrity. Furthermore, it allows us to integrate insights from the literatures on consolidated and unconsolidated democracies that disproportionally rely on national and local measures of electoral integrity, respectively.

Next, I carefully explore three categories of election-day activities that are relevant for voters in regimes with less experience with multipartyism. These include experience with (1) electoral manipulation, (2) electoral administrative irregularities, and (3) election observers. Overall, I advance a potential mechanism linking election-day activities with voters’ perceptions of electoral integrity. Specifically, I suggest that voting provides first-hand information about a wide range of issues that can potentially undermine or enhance the electoral process. Direct exposure to one (or many) of these issues, be it positive or negative, may raise its salience, and prompt voters to consider this issue when making assessments of electoral integrity both locally and nationally.

To examine these propositions, I rely on survey data collected after the March 2015 presidential elections in Nigeria—Africa’s most populous country that, despite transitioning to multiparty elections in 1999, has not successfully consolidated its democratic regime. I find that experiences with manipulation, administrative irregularities, and election observers are important sources of voters’ election quality evaluations, even after accounting for voters’ winner/loser status and media exposure. There are two main caveats to these findings, however. First, experience with electoral manipulation seems to have the most consistent and substantively damaging consequences for voters’ electoral integrity judgments. Second, the salience of some election-day experiences varies based on whether voters were making local or national integrity evaluations. For instance, I distinguish between domestic and international observers and find that voters who witnessed international observers were also more likely to espouse confidence in the integrity of national elections, while voters who witnessed domestic observers only expressed confidence in the integrity of the elections at their polling station (local evaluations).

The article attempts to make the following key contributions to theory and practice. First, by conceptually distinguishing between local and national election integrity evaluations and specifying three relevant types of election-day experiences, this article is one of the first to clearly show that experiences on election day are positively associated with citizens’ election quality opinions in non-established democracies. In so doing, it helps to advance the literatures on electoral integrity, election administration, and more generally on democratization. Second, the finding that election observation is positively associated with confidence in the electoral process helps to build upon the ever-expanding research program on the consequences of election observation that has so far paid less attention to the consequences of observation on everyday voters (Bush and Prather, 2017; Kelley, 2012b). More specifically, the findings suggest that domestic and international observers may be serving distinct, yet complimentary, roles that when taken together help to enhance voters’ confidence in the electoral process.

Conceptualizing Electoral Integrity

Scholars and policy experts have yet to arrive at a consensus on how to conceptualize the integrity of elections (Norris, 2014; Svensson and Elklit, 1997; Van Ham, 2014). I advance a conceptualization informed by Norris and her coauthors who associate electoral integrity with “international conventions and global norms, applying universally to all countries worldwide throughout the electoral cycle, including during the pre-electoral period, the campaign, and on polling day, and its aftermath” (Norris et al., 2014). Moreover, I contend that citizens have the cognitive capacity to develop their own evaluations of the integrity of elections based on personal experience with various stages of the electoral process and information accessed through the media and a variety of partisan and independent sources (Bratton, 2013).

Previous studies have adopted various approaches to operationalizing citizens’ electoral integrity judgments (Gronke, 2013). One dominant approach examines citizens’ national-level evaluations of electoral integrity. Perhaps one of the most widely used metrics of national-level integrity in comparative literature is citizens’ perceptions of the “freeness and fairness” of elections. Another approach switches the focus from the macro-level to citizens’ local assessments of electoral integrity as it relates to their experience or the experience of others in their immediate community. Common indicators of local evaluations usually emphasize detailed aspects of the electoral process such as voters’ confidence in the accuracy of vote counting.

One of the main contributions of this article is the simultaneous exploration of both national and local evaluations of electoral integrity. Specifically, I examine how voters’ varied experiences at the polls may influence their integrity assessments associated with

Local level: integrity of the vote counting process at polling stations

National level: overall integrity of the election process

The decision to distinguish between local and national election integrity evaluations is informed by research on economic voting which has conventionally sought to disentangle citizens’ evaluations of their personal economic conditions (pocketbook) from their national economy evaluations (socio-tropic). Making the pocketbook/socio-tropic economic attitudes distinction has been theoretically meaningful because the process through which these two attitudes are formed may be different (Duch et al., 2000), while both attitudes have distinct consequences on voting behavior (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000).

Building on these insights, I argue that disentangling local and national integrity evaluations may have theoretical and empirical implications for research on how citizens formulate their perceptions of election integrity.³ From a theoretical perspective, I argue that citizens may develop multiple targets of their election integrity evaluations, in a similar way in which they do for economic considerations. Two possible targets may include evaluations of elections in their local community (local) and elections at the national level (national). One reason why citizens may make the local/national distinction is because there are several “objective” conditions that may make the perceived quality of local elections deviate from what takes place in other areas of the country.⁴ Another reason is that the types of information that citizens rely on to make local integrity evaluations may potentially differ from those used to make evaluations for the country as a whole.⁵

When taken together, it may be possible that the process through which citizens develop their evaluations of local versus national-level election integrity may not always be consistent. This has direct implications for studying the effects of experience on election day because it may mean that, in theory, citizens may place greater significance on some forms of experiences when formulating local versus national evaluations. I am not alone in positing this view. Birch (2010: 1608) explains that:

even the most naive of voters can be expected to be aware that they have “observed” the electoral process at their polling station for a very small proportion of the time it was in operation and that their sample of one polling place constitutes a poor basis on which to generalize to the electoral process as a whole.

In sum, specifying different targets of integrity evaluation could broaden the conventional understanding of how citizens formulate their perceptions of electoral integrity.

Making the local/national distinction also has important implications on the existing empirical literature that seeks to examine the consequences of direct experience on citizens’ election integrity evaluations. As mentioned previously, most studies, in the context of emerging democracies, make inferences relating to the consequences of experience without considering how it affects anything other than citizens’ national integrity evaluations (Kerr, 2013; Mattes, 2014). Consequently, scholars have limited understanding of how citizens formulate their attitudes toward electoral fairness within their most immediate environs. I argue, therefore, that specifying more than one target of citizens’ integrity evaluations may lead to a modification of the results of existing empirical studies and perhaps place us one step closer to unraveling the complex relationship between experience and election quality evaluations.

Election-Day Experiences and Electoral Integrity Perceptions

While there are myriad experiences on election day that potentially signal the performance of the electoral process, in this article, I focus on three main categories of experiences:

Experience with electoral manipulation

Experience with electoral administrative irregularities

Experience with electoral observers (third-party actors)

The decision to focus on these three categories of experiences was guided by the existing theoretical and empirical literatures that have identified electoral manipulation and problems with election administration as crucial determinants of public trust in elections, especially in emerging democratic contexts (Birch, 2008; Kerr and Lührmann, 2017; Pastor, 1999). Meanwhile, the academic and policy communities have increasingly examined the role of “third-party” actors in regimes with less experience with multipartyism, with non-partisan, independent domestic and international election observers being the most widely studied and potentially influential (Bush and Prather, 2017; Chernykh, 2015; Ichino and Schündeln, 2012; Kelley, 2012a). Admittedly, there are other experiences not included within the three aforementioned categories that could potentially sway citizens’ attitudes toward elections.⁶ Nonetheless, I am convinced that the selected categories provide an important first cut at a multidimensional assessment of the consequences of election-day experiences in the context of regimes with less experience with multipartyism.

Experience with Electoral Manipulation

Following Sarah Birch (2011), I define electoral manipulation as the deliberate attempt on the part of political elites to bias any stage of the electoral process for partisan gain. I distinguish between electoral manipulation and administrative irregularities (maladministration) that often arise unexpectedly due to deficiencies in the human, technological, or administrative capacity of electoral officials. The deleterious consequences of electoral manipulation on democratic attitudes and behavior have been well noted in the literature (Bratton, 2008; Hall and Stewart, 2013; Norris, 2014). The conventional wisdom is that knowledge of, and experience with, electoral manipulation undermines the perceived legitimacy of the electoral process by signaling to voters the inability of political elites to adhere to the norms of electoral fairness (Schedler, 2013). Although studies have found that citizens’ experiences with electoral violence and intimidation during election campaigns can depress voter participation (Bratton, 2008; Simpser, 2013) and lower perceptions of election quality (Kerr, 2013; Wellman et al., 2017), very few studies have systematically assessed the consequences of manipulation for voters who experience these issues on election day.⁷ Shining the light on election-day manipulation is vital because, in addition to intimidation and monetary inducements, there are other forms of fraud such as ballot box stuffing, underage or double voting that citizens are only potentially exposed to while exercising their franchise. Moreover, studies that examine election-day experiences, either sidestep issues of manipulation, or find, unexpectedly, that direct experience with manipulation is not an essential predictor of citizens’ assessments of national election quality (Shah, 2015; Wellman et al., 2017).⁸

I argue that manipulation occurring at polling stations has the potential to compromise the perceived integrity of the process. Specifically, experience with fraud disrupts the quality of the voting process and undermines citizens’ faith that their votes will be counted accurately. While the extent to which experience with manipulation will figure into national evaluations of election quality is unclear, there is no doubt that personal experience will encourage affected voters to infer that fraud is systematically orchestrated in other regions of the country. Based on these arguments, I suggest the following hypotheses:

H1a: Voters who experience electoral manipulation are less likely to express confidence in the integrity of the vote count.

H1b: Voters who experience electoral manipulation are less likely to express confidence in the integrity of the national elections.

Experience with Administrative Irregularities

While scholarly understanding of how voters react to electoral manipulation on election day may be underdeveloped, much more is known about voters’ reaction to the administration of elections, mainly because of the exhaustive literature conducted in the United States. Using a variety of metrics to gauge the performance of election administration—including the time it takes to vote, the competence of election authorities, and the effectiveness of voting machinery—existing research has demonstrated that citizens’ experience with election administration matters for their perceptions of electoral integrity (Atkeson and Saunders, 2007; Claassen et al., 2012). However, the black box of election-day experiences has not been effectively unpacked outside the context of developed democracies. This is in part due to the lack of survey questions that specifically gauge voters’ experience with these varied interactions with election administration. Some studies have relied on citizens’ evaluations of the performance of election management, but very few tap into more “objective” assessments of voters’ experience with different dimensions of the voting process.⁹

First, I posit that voters’ experiences with administrative irregularities can influence the quality of the voting experience by making it more difficult for voters to cast their ballot. Second, administrative irregularities can also affect voters’ confidence in the integrity of the process, both at the local and national levels. Confidence may be lowered because voters believe that administrative problems are egregious enough to distort key aspects of the voting or vote counting process. Based on this, I hypothesize that

H2a: Voters who experience administrative irregularities are less likely to express confidence in the integrity of the vote count.

H2b: Voters who experience administrative irregularities are less likely to express confidence in the integrity of the national elections.

Experience with Election Observers

A third and less examined dimension of the election-day experience is voters’ interactions with other state and civic actors. A dominant feature of elections in countries that recently introduce multipartyism is that, in addition to voters and election officials, numerous other state and civic actors are legally sanctioned to serve specific functions during voting that seek to enhance the integrity of the electoral process. Therefore, it is not uncommon for voters to come into direct contact with international/domestic observers, political party agents, security officials, and the media while casting a ballot.

This article focuses specifically on the role of election observers and how their reported presence at the polling station may structure citizens’ opinions about election integrity. One reason for probing the consequences of election observation is that the existing literature is replete with studies that investigate the theoretical and empirical implications of international and domestic election observation on the strategic behavior of political elites (Beaulieu and Hyde, 2009; Ichino and Schündeln, 2012) and the overall quality of elections (Donno, 2013; Kelley, 2012b). For instance, Susan Hyde and Nikolay Marinov (2014) argue that international observers can deter government-motivated electoral fraud by providing information on the quality of the elections. Meanwhile, recent field experiments by Fredrik Sjoberg (2012), Nahomi Ichino and Matthias Schündeln (2012), and Joseph Asunka et al. (2017) reveal the effectiveness of domestic observers in reducing electoral fraud in the polling stations and voter registration centers that they visit.

Nonetheless, only a few studies have assessed the direct implications of domestic and international observers for the attitudes and behavior of voters (Brancati, 2014; Bush and Prather, 2017; Cantú and García-Ponce, 2015). One notable exception is a recent study by Francisco Cantú and Omar García-Ponce’s (2015) that investigates the relationhsip between the presence of election observers and citizens’ perceptions of electoral integrity during the 2012 Mexican legislative elections.¹⁰ Contrary to the authors’ expectations, they find that Mexicans’ perceptions of election quality were not shaped by the presence of observers.

Guided by the literature on the fraud reducing effects of election observers, I suggest that the presence of domestic and international election observers should boost citizens’ election integrity perceptions because they may help deter fraud on the part of election officials and local political elites within the polling stations. Furthermore, the presence of election observers may also signal to voters an incumbent’s commitment to play by the rules of the game, since their presence increases the chances for fraud to be detected and publicly exposed at the national level. Therefore, I expect,

H3a: Voters who witness election observers at the polls are more likely to express confidence in the integrity of the vote count.

H3b: Voters who witness election observers at the polls are more likely to express confidence in the integrity of the national elections.

Data and Variables

The main source of data for this analysis is a nationally representative survey conducted in Nigeria between July and August 2015 by Practical Sampling International (PSI) on behalf of the International Foundation of Electoral Systems (IFES, 2015). PSI conducted face-to-face, household interviews with 2616 Nigerians aged 18 or above in all of Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). PSI employed a stratified multi-stage random selection procedure to achieve a nationally representative sample that allows for inferences based on a ±1.9 margin of error at a 95% confidence interval.

Nigeria is an ideal case to examine the link between election experience and perceptions of election quality. Nigeria’s presidential and parliamentary elections, held on March 28th, were the fifth consecutive elections since the reintroduction of multiparty rule in 1999, and represented a milestone in the country’s democratic development.¹¹ Unlike previous elections that were characterized by widespread political violence, systematic ballot fraud, and administrative irregularities, international and domestic observers were unanimous in describing the 2015 process free, fair, and credible (Lewis and Kew, 2015). The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Nigeria’s main electoral management body, was widely recognized by stakeholders for its political autonomy and commitment to reducing electoral fraud (European Union, 2015; Situation Room, 2015a). This was accomplished by updating the voter register and introducing biometric electronic voter identification system (card readers) and permanent voter cards (PVC) (Owen and Usman, 2015). The 2015 elections were also historic because it represented the first time in Nigeria’s democratic history that an incumbent president was democratically replaced as Muhammadu Buhari, candidate for the opposition All Progressive Congress (APC), defeated incumbent president Goodluck Jonathan of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The APC also swept the National Assembly elections, bringing an end to the PDP’s 16-year dominance of the Nigerian political landscape (Anejionu et al., 2016).

Although the 2015 presidential contest was a marked improvement over previous elections, it was far from perfect. Between January and 11 April, 160 lives were lost in election-related violence, with 19 persons perishing on the day of the presidential elections (European Union, 2015). INEC postponed the presidential and national assembly elections for 6 weeks on the advice of Nigeria’s National Security Advisor because the military could not guarantee adequate election security due to the ongoing insurgency against Boko Haram (Situation Room, 2015a). However, domestic rights groups and the main opposition APC believed that the ruling PDP deliberately orchestrated the postponement as a last ditch effort to bolster voter support (Owen and Usman, 2015).

While there were no legal challenges of presidential election results, candidates in governorship, national, and state assembly elections filed 680 post-election election petitions (Bamgboye, 2016). This resulted in several legislative and gubernatorial elections being overturned by the courts, in some cases because of incontrovertible evidence of electoral fraud and malpractice (Oke, 2015). Finally, observers described the general polling process during the national elections as disorganized and time intensive because most polling stations opened late and the newly introduced card readers failed to effectively capture voters’ fingerprints and reconcile them with the voters register (European Union, 2015; Situation Room, 2015a).

Dependent Variables: Perceptions of Electoral Integrity

To capture voters’ perceptions of electoral integrity, I utilize two indicators that distinguish between national and local integrity judgments. The first indicator proxies voters’ national evaluations through a commonly used survey question that gauges the perceived freeness and fairness of the national election (integrity of national elections) “How free and fair do you think 2015 Presidential Elections was?”¹² The second operationalizes voters’ confidence in the vote counting process (integrity of counting process) at their polling stations: “In terms of vote counting for the 2015 elections, are you confident or not confident that votes in your polling unit were counted in line with people’s voting intentions?” Higher values on both indicators signify higher levels of perceived integrity.

Table 1 displays Nigerians’ perceptions of national and local electoral integrity. Approximately 6 of 10 Nigerians considered the 2015 presidential elections “completely free and fair.” Meanwhile, only 39% of Nigerians’ expressed complete confidence (“very confident”) in the fairness of the vote count at their polling station. This provides the first indication that citizens’ attitudes toward local and national election evaluations although having similarities (in that the modal response is consistent with the highest levels of integrity) are somewhat distinct. Moreover, I find the Spearman’s correlation between local and national evaluations is moderately low (r = .443).¹³

Table 1.

Distribution of Main Dependent Variables.

Integrity of National Elections^a
Completely free and fair	61%
Somewhat free and fair	23%
Not too free and fair	8%
Not at all free and fair	4%
DK/Refused	4%
Integrity of Vote Counting (Local)^b
Very confident	39%
Somewhat confident	40%
Not too confident	13%
Not at all confident	4%
DK/Refused	4%

Column percentages represent weighted responses to the following questions:

How free and fair do you think 2015 Presidential Election was?

In terms of vote counting for the 2015 elections, are you confident or not confident that votes in your polling unit were counted in line with people’s voting intentions?

Independent Variables

The IFES survey includes a battery of questions that tap into experience on election day. These questions were directed to the 2003 citizens (or 77% of the sample) who reported that they voted in 28 March 2015 presidential election.¹⁴ To examine the hypothesized relationship between experience with electoral manipulation and perceptions of electoral integrity, I construct an additive scale (experience manipulation) that reflects voters’ exposure to any of the following five types of fraudulent activities at their polling station: (1) double voting, (2) underage voting, (3) non-citizens voting, (4) tampering or stealing ballot boxes, and (5) voter intimidation.¹⁵ Approximately, 20% of respondents reported witnessing at least one of these acts of manipulation, and 7% of respondents witnessing two or more.

I assess citizens’ experiences with election administrative irregularities through two indicators. First, following the introduction of electronic card readers as devices that can accurately identify voters using biometric data in 2015, IFES asked Nigerians whether or not electronic card readers malfunctioned during the presidential elections (ineffective card readers). Another proxy of electoral administrative irregularities is time spent voting, as voters who spend more time waiting to vote may become more disgruntled and lose confidence in the process. I include an indicator that combines the time respondents reported taking to (1) verify their identification and (2) cast their ballots (time at polling station). Across the sample of Nigerian voters, 9% experienced malfunctioning card readers, and a plurality spent more than 2 hours waiting to vote.

The measurement strategy to gauge voters’ experience with election observers is straightforward. Specifically, I distinguish between domestic and international observer groups through two questions that ask whether voters witnessed (1) domestic and (2) international observers near the polling station. Descriptive results reveal that one-third of voters reported seeing international observers and this more than doubled for domestic observers (72%).

Control Variables

In addition to the main independent variables, I also account for other factors that may mediate the relationship between election-day experience and citizens’ opinions on election integrity. I operationalize citizens’ winner/loser status through a series of binary variables that distinguish between voters who report being affiliated with the APC (support APC)—the winner of the 2015 presidential election—PDP (support PDP)—the pre-election incumbent—and other losing political parties (support Others) as well as voters who report no party affiliation (Independents). Additionally, citizens’ religious, ethnic, or regional attachments to presidential candidates may also structure attitudes toward the integrity of elections. During the 2015 Nigerian elections, religion was a particularly salient cultural identity (Anejionu et al., 2016). Muhammadu Buhari, the winning presidential candidate, is a practicing Muslim, while the incumbent and presidential loser, Goodluck Jonathan, is a practicing Christian. This distinction reinforced a longstanding religious cleavage in Nigeria between the predominantly Muslim north and Christian south (Langer and Ukiwo, 2008). I account for the potential effect of religious affiliation by distinguishing between citizens who report practicing Islam and those practicing any other major religion including Christianity or no religious affiliation (Muslim).

Furthermore, I control for specific experiences that occur before election day that could also influence election integrity judgments such as experience with vote buying (experience with votebuying)¹⁶ and participation in any campaign events (participated in campaigns). Studies also suggest that the link between personal experience and political attitudes may be mediated by information exposure, as the less informed may rely more on personal experience when forming public attitudes (Hetherington, 1996). Accordingly, I include a measure of citizens’ media exposure (index) and suggest that consumption of political information through newspapers, television, radio, and social media should lower citizens’ reliance on personal experiences when judging electoral integrity. Finally, to account for any other unobserved individual attributes, I include indicators for gender (female), education, age, and urban/rural residency (urban).

Results

I conduct a multivariate regression that probes the association between election-day experiences and local and national electoral integrity judgments while controlling for other relevant demographic and contextual factors. Table 2 presents the results of the multilevel ordered logistic regression¹⁷ on national (Model 1) and local (Model 2) perceptions of election integrity.¹⁸ To simplify the interpretation of the ordered logit coefficients, substantive results are displayed in Table 3.¹⁹

Table 2.

Correlates of Nigerians’ Evaluations of Electoral Integrity.

	National Elections		Vote Counting
	Model 1		Model 2
Experience Indicators
Experience Manipulation (scale)	−0.395***	(0.108)	−0.321**	(0.117)
Experience Ineffective Card Readers	−0.949***	(0.254)	−0.535*	(0.233)
Time at Polling Station	−0.074*	(0.032)	0.006	(0.037)
Witness International Observers	0.523**	(0.199)	0.217	(0.193)
Witness Domestic Observers	0.216	(0.149)	0.460**	(0.154)
Individual Controls
Support PDP (ref: APC)	−0.852***	(0.259)	−0.330	(0.206)
Support Others (ref: APC)	−0.152	(0.310)	−0.141	(0.248)
Independents (ref: APC)	−0.956***	(0.290)	−0.385	(0.264)
Muslims (ref: non-Muslims)	1.181**	(0.402)	0.780***	(0.167)
Experience Votebuying	−0.226	(0.208)	0.033	(0.178)
Participation in Campaigns	0.054	(0.192)	0.538***	(0.140)
Media Exposure (Index)	0.164	(0.681)	0.987*	(0.465)
Female	0.167	(0.136)	0.047	(0.100)
Education	−0.021	(0.121)	−0.041	(0.103)
Age	−0.002	(0.009)	−0.001	(0.005)
Urban resident	−0.058	(0.247)	0.132	(0.161)
State-Level Controls
Margin of Victory	−1.340*	(0.633)	−1.144**	(0.404)
APC Governor	−0.361	(0.451)	−0.380	(0.267)
Cut point 1	−5.773***	(0.873)	−3.699***	(0.536)
Cut point 2	−4.178***	(0.842)	−1.734**	(0.540)
Cut point 3	−2.117**	(0.821)	0.870	(0.511)
State Random Effects (Variance)	1.209***	(0.364)	0.435**	(0.137)
−2 × Log Likelihood	−1073		−1475
Individuals	1684		1663
States (and FCT)	37		37

PDP: Peoples Democratic Party; APC: All Progressive Congress; FCT: Federal Capital Territory.

Dependent Variable (1) Integrity of national elections and (2) Integrity of counting process. Multilevel ordered logistic regression using MEOLOGIT in STATA. Cell entries are logit coefficients (standard errors). Sampling weights included.

Significance levels: ***p < 0.001; **p < 0.01; *p < 0.05.

Table 3.

Predicted Changes in Estimated National and Local Electoral Integrity Evaluations.

	National Elections	Vote Counting
Mean Respondent	0.73	0.42
Experience Manipulation (Δ 0/5)	−0.37	−0.29
Experience Manipulation (Δ 0/1)	−0.06	−0.07
Experience Ineffective Card Readers (Δ 0/1)	−0.17	−0.11
Time at Polling Station (Δ 2/12)	−0.12	0.02
Witness International Observers (Δ 0/1)	0.08	0.05
Witness Domestic Observers (Δ 0/1)	0.04	0.10

Post-estimation using Margins in Stata 14. Estimations based on Model 1 and 2 and indicate the predicted probability changes (1) in reporting “completely free” national integrity evaluations and (2) being “very confident” in the integrity of the vote count, given specified changes of experience measures, holding controls at their mean. For space considerations, this table does not include the predicted changes for the other three categories of the dependent variables.

Overall, the findings demonstrate that election-day experiences are strongly associated with local and national evaluations of electoral integrity, even after controlling for other variables in the model. First, the hypotheses related to experience with electoral manipulation (H1a-b) are confirmed. In both Models 1 and 2, the coefficients for the experience manipulation are negative and significant. As shown in the predicted probability graphs (Figures 1 and 2), Nigerians who experienced one or more types of manipulation were also significantly less likely to judge the 2015 presidential elections as “completely free and fair” and less likely to report being “very confident” in the vote counting process at their polling station.²⁰

Figure 1.

Predicted Changes in Estimated National Integrity Evaluations Across Experience with Manipulation.

Figure 2.

Predicted Changes in Estimated Local Integrity Evaluations Across Experience with Manipulation.

Moving to the hypotheses concerning citizens’ experience with administrative irregularities (H2a-b), the negative and significant coefficients for ineffective card reader suggest that voters who encountered malfunctioning machines were less willing to report having the highest degree of confidence in the integrity of the vote count (−11%) and less willing to consider the national electoral process “completely free and fair” (−17%).²¹ Furthermore, as hypothesized, voters who spent more time at the polling station were less likely to consider national elections free and fair (−12%), but time at polling station was not significantly correlated with confidence in the vote count.

Finally, the results concerning election observers (H3a-b) indicate that, on one hand, Nigerian voters who witnessed international observers were more likely to espouse confidence in the integrity of national elections, but there was no association between witnessing international observers and confidence in the vote count. On the other hand, however, voters who cast their ballot in the presence of domestic observers were more likely to express confidence in the integrity of the counting process at their polling station, but the effect fails to gain significance for national election quality judgments. This is an important finding as it not only emphasizes the significance of election observers for Nigerians’ confidence in the process but it also underscores the value in distinguishing between local and national evaluations of election integrity. As I elaborate below in the “Discussion and Conclusion” section, citizens may be attaching different meanings to their interactions with domestic versus international observers.

Turning now to the main control variables, I find that voters’ partisan affiliation with the presidential winner boosts perceptions of national integrity but has no effect on local integrity. Mainly, PDP partisans and Independents were less likely to espouse positive national electoral integrity evaluations when compared to partisans of the APC—the party that won the 2015 presidential election. The non-significance of winner/loser status on local integrity evaluations was unexpected, but seemed to be attributable to the strong effect that religious affiliation with the winning candidate had on citizens’ perceptions of electoral integrity. Specifically, we find that practicing Muslims had higher evaluations of local and national integrity relative to other respondents. Furthermore, citizens who were offered material inducements in return for their vote (experience vote buying) were no more likely to consider national elections to be fair or to have confidence in the local vote count. This finding is not surprising, as previous research in the Nigerian context (Kerr, 2013) has shown that vote buying is a pervasive practice that may not necessarily lower perceptions of electoral integrity for those who are offered. Meanwhile, voters who participated in campaign events were more confident in the accuracy of the vote counting process but campaigning did not make a significant difference for national integrity evaluations. Although voters’ exposure to print and broadcast media had no significant correlation with national integrity evaluations, it seemed to have boosted confidence in integrity of the vote count. Finally, none of the measures of social structure were statistically associated with evaluations of national or local election integrity.²²

Discussion and Conclusion

This article examines the relationship between what happens to voters on election day and their perceptions of electoral integrity in regimes with relatively less experience with multipartyism. This is an important line of inquiry because citizens’ electoral integrity attitudes are essential for democratic legitimacy, and most studies examining the experience-integrity nexus in the context of non-advanced democracies find that election experience is of minimal importance (Cantú and García-Ponce, 2015; McAllister and White, 2011; Shah, 2015). In an attempt to reevaluate the role of election experience, I distinguish between three categories of election-day experiences (manipulation, administrative irregularities, and election observers) and argue that these experiences provide vital information that can help voters assess the integrity of the process (1) at their own polling stations (local evaluations) and the (2) country as a whole (national evaluations).

Using recent survey data collected after the 2015 elections in Nigeria, I find that Nigerians’ election-day experiences are strongly associated with their evaluations of electoral integrity, even after accounting for the winner/loser effect. For instance, Nigerians who witnessed different types of electoral manipulation and problems with voter identification machines were consistently less likely to espouse confidence in the integrity of elections. Surprisingly, however, the salience of some experiences, such as witnessing election observers, depends on whether citizens are making local or national integrity evaluations.

While these findings are specific to Nigeria’s 2015 national elections, they provide crucial insights for scholars. First, they are consistent with research conducted in the US context and suggest that when citizens formulate their perceptions of election integrity, they also rely on information gathered through experiences on election day (Alvarez et al., 2008; Atkeson and Saunders, 2007; King, 2016). This reinforces the view that voters have the cognitive capacity to make meaningful evaluations of election quality (Bratton, 2013; Norris, 2014) as we see how experiences related to perceived fraudulent behavior within polling stations as well as the proper functioning of voting technology influence citizens’ attitudes toward the quality of elections.

At the same time, this study highlights the need for more scholarship to unearth the black box of election-day experiences in new democracies and hybrid regimes. Especially because this study’s findings are in stark contrast to others conducted in other new democracies and hybrid regimes, many of which suggests that experience has seemingly less relevance for popular electoral integrity perceptions (e.g. Shah, 2015). Possibly, there is something unique about the context of the 2015 Nigerian elections that make voters more likely to rely on experiences to inform their election quality. For example, Nigeria’s 2015 elections were in many ways distinct: they were relatively peaceful and efficiently organized, resulted in political turnover, and the opposition accepted defeat (Lewis and Kew, 2015). This highlights a fruitful line of inquiry for comparative scholars to explore: Do regime and election characteristics mediate the relationship between citizens’ election experiences and their election integrity attitudes?

This study also suggests that there may be some value in distinguishing between local and national electoral integrity judgments. Because information gathered through election-day experience is contextualized, we should not expect the process through which citizens formulate their local and national evaluations to be congruous. A perfect example of the asymmetry is seen with election observers. According to the results, witnessing an international observer is positively correlated with national election integrity perceptions, while witnessing a domestic observer is associated with higher confidence in the accuracy of the vote count.

It is possible that domestic and international observers may influence voters’ electoral integrity in distinct ways. For instance, international and domestic observers differ fundamentally with respect to the size of their delegations, time spent at each polling station, and their ability to hold national/local political elites accountable (Sjoberg, 2012). If voters are cognizant of these differences (either through prior election experience or being exposed to information on election observation before election day), one reason why Nigerian voters may associate international observers with higher national election quality perceptions is because international observers spend relatively less time at each polling station. Meanwhile, however, the media often publicize international observer delegations when they make courtesy calls to national political elites and hold pre/post-election conferences in which they release statements about the quality of elections. As a result, voters may assume that international observers hold larger sway over constraining the behaviors of national-level political elites. On the other hand, while domestic observers may have less political gravitas at the national level, their relatively larger delegations, scope of deployment, longer time spent at individual polling stations, and familiarity with local communities may help enhance the credibility of the counting process and boost the capacity of election administration.

The study’s findings are equally relevant for domestic policymakers and international donors who continue to develop strategies to improve the voting process and enhance public legitimacy of the elections. Regarding election observation, the results suggest that domestic and international observers may be serving distinct yet complimentary roles that when taken together are essential for enhancing voters’ confidence in the electoral process. The results also show that the proper functioning of the newly introduced biometric voter identification system or “card readers” significantly influenced Nigerians’ confidence in the 2015 elections. However, this finding only scratches the surface. Given the fact that since 2002 over 27 African countries have introduced the use of biometric registration (Piccolino, 2015), these results underscore the importance of further research that can assess voters’ reaction to the use of technology in the voting process.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments, I thank Rola Abdul-Latif, Emily Beaulieu, Jeffery Conroy-Krutz, Anna Lührmann, Shane Singh and Rakesh Sharma. I am also grateful to the Applied Learning and Research Center at the International Foundation of Electoral Systems for involving me in the design and administration of the 2015 post-election survey in Nigeria. Any remaining errors are the responsibility of the author.

Supplementary Material

Supplementary material for this article is available online.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Nicholas Kerr is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alabama. His current research agenda focuses on how multiparty elections in electoral democracies and competitive autocracies shape popular evaluations of political legitimacy, including trust in the electoral process, satisfaction with democracy, and support for regime principles. Nicholas has experience conducting fieldwork and organizing surveys in several African countries and his published work has appeared in Electoral Studies, Governance, Journal of Modern African Studies, and Political Research Quarterly.

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