Their nature and functions make political parties central to democratic governance especially in the new democracies of Africa that face the challenge of building strong and enduring democratic institutions. It is accepted that the existing trend in most of these democracies of one big party dominating the political space weakens democracy and undermines its prospects for consolidation. Big parties-usually the ruling ones-exhibit tendencies such as absence of internal democracy that are antithetical to democratic governance. While observations such as these are incontestable, there is little understanding into the nature, character, ideology, and internal structure of big parties generally. In this article, I attempt to address this concern. Specifically, I examine the nature, structure, and ideology of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Nigeria's ruling party at the federal level with considerable strength at local level between 1999 and 2015. Relying on data obtained from multiple sources, I investigate the process of its formation, the nature of its ideology, internal organization, its electoral strength, and how absence of internal democracy contributed significantly to its defeat in 2015 general elections.

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The major challenges connected to Nigeria’s political party politics includes ideology, corruption, money politics, ethno religious fragmentations, violence and a dominant ruling party with some opposition parties challenging each other. Studies on Nigerian political parties are narrow in advocating for practical solutions to the challenges of party politics in Nigeria, particularly considering the emerging shift in the voting choices of the citizens during the 2007 and 2019 general elections in Bauchi State. This indicates that the influence of political parties on voters appears to be in decline, or at the very least experiencing significant change. Thus, the nature of this evidence of decline and what it means for the future of parties and representative democracy needs to be investigated with realistic way out, which this study aims at through a qualitative method of data collection and analysis. The study concludes that, while political parties are reasonably and normatively important to the process of representative democracy, party politics in Nigeria should embrace a collective viewpoint and common ideology of serving and developing the welfare of the electorates as well as to aggregate, articulate, and stimulate the electorates interests in the form of policy alternatives. In addition, Nigerian political party system must be is a system of connections consequential from inter-party competition. This imply that each party as a component affects and is influenced in turn by the performance of the other parties within Nigeria’s political system.