Political hibernation in‐between elections? Exploring the online communication and mobilisation capacities of Nigeria's political parties

Abstract

A noteworthy limitation among existing studies on the use of online technologies by political parties is the focus on elections. This study extends the frontiers by examining the extent to which Nigeria's political parties use their websites, as well as Facebook and Twitter platforms to communicate and mobilise citizens during and beyond elections. Using web assessment survey, data collected from the online platforms of registered political parties in February 2015 and February 2017 were analysed-to see trends in online activities during (2015 elections) and outside of elections ( 2017). The study reveals that the parties are caught in the web of the contradictory possibilities of digital engagement. On the one hand, is an online quiescence in the period between elections, which is premised on poor party institutionalisation. On the other hand, the parties are largely unable to reverse elements of institutionalisation challenges by leveraging digital tools to develop roots in the society and boost their public image. This quandary helps to demonstrate where the Nigerian party system fits in the equalisation versus normalisation debate on the utility of digital tools.

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“…In this respect, the definition of a clear strategy and policy guidelines on how to manage SM (Gordon et al, 2017), as well as the availability of trained personnel who can manage social pages (Bennett & Manoharan, 2017) are critical elements to fully exploit the benefits of having official profiles on SM platforms, which unfortunately are often lacking. Second, SM discussions impact political opinion formation and may be used to act upon voting behavior (Kushwaha et al, 2022; Odeyemi et al, 2022). For example, Grover et al (2019) have shown that, in the 2016 US presidential election, political candidates have used TW not only for spreading information but also for influencing voters' political views through the acculturation of ideologies among voters and subsequent voter polarization.…”