Abstract
Political competition in Africa is often characterized as suffering from a number of deficiencies at the level of political discourse and electoral campaigns, which together paint a picture of an essentially vacuous political life. This article contends that these absences are to some degree methodologically generated. If African political actors appear to have little substance to say about the most pressing social and economic issue of the day, then perhaps as scholars of politics we are looking at what they say in the wrong way? This article points to the limitations of an increasingly popular method of discourse analysis in African politics based on coding political statements within a framework that contrasts valence politics with a position-based appeals framework. It argues for an alternative more contextualized, inductive method of analysing political discourse as the struggle to control the meaning of key terms, using the example highly contested gubernatorial election in Nigeria’s southwest. Debates over “stomach infrastructure” and a “hierarchy of needs” reveal the possibility that political discourse and electoral campaigning that on more mechanistic methodologies look devoid of substantive political contestation in fact contain competing conceptions of development and what the state should do.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1513-1535 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | democratization |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue number | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |
Keywords
- African politics
- discourse analysis
- Lagos model
- Nigerian politics
- stomach infrastructure
- Valence politics