Abstract

Abstract:
Voter turnout in Nigeria's general election has declined precipitously from 52.3 percent in 1999 to 26.7 percent in 2023 — one of the sharpest sustained declines among Sub-Saharan Africa's nascent democracies. Using constituency-level panel data from seven electoral cycles, merged with household survey data from the National Bureau of Statistics and the Nigeria Living Standards Survey, we employ mixed-effects regression and Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition to identify the socioeconomic drivers of this decline. Poverty incidence, youth unemployment, female labour-force exclusion, and regional economic shocks collectively account for a substantial share of the observed trend, but their effects are heterogeneous across geopolitical zones. The paper quantifies these contributions, tests for threshold effects, and examines whether economic interventions targeted at structural inequality could plausibly reverse the participation decline.