Executive Dominance and How to Break It: Evidence from Subnational Legislatures in Nigeria

In many patronage-based regimes in the Global South, parliaments are characterized as rubber-stamp institutions. Chief executives use ‘carrot and stick’- approaches to ensure Members of Parliament (MPs) approve of their policies and fail to challenge pervasive patterns of corruption. Executive-legislative relations are exemplary of how power is exercised in the regime in general. Often, power is personalistic and concentrated in a single individual who controls access to state resources. Nevertheless, patronage systems are also sensitive to factional struggles, breakdowns of elite coalitions, and power shifts. Especially in hybrid regimes, characterized by some degree of electoral competition and opposition, patronage systems are not static but rather dynamic constellations. Moments in which regime leaders are weakened can provide windows of opportunity for other institutions to strengthen themselves (including parliament and judiciary) and for opposition and civil society actors to see governance demands met. Such moments can hence strengthen democracy. Unfortunately, we still lack strong systematic knowledge on when such moments are likely to arise: when are patronage-systems likely to see power fragmentation, when are personalistic leaders likely to become weak, and when can opposition actors challenge dominant parties? In this paper, I contribute to addressing these questions by drawing on the case of Nigeria’s subnational states. The 36 states in the country are generally known to be firmly in the grasp of chief executives (governors) who exert strong control over patronage flows. This general pattern hides important variations, however. I focus on legislative-executive interactions in Nigeria’s 36 states since the start of the Fourth Republic in 1999 to highlight these variations. Legislative-executive interactions are used as proxies for measuring chief executives’ control over the state: how often do MPs challenge governors? Do they scrutinize and adapt the budget or pass it in a matter of days? Do they sponsor private bills or is the legislative rhythm determined by executive bills? Do MPs (attempt to) impeach governors? Do governors have to get rid of principal officers to achieve their objectives? Are governors able to rely on large incumbent party seat shares or not? Using these questions as coding guidelines, I categorize the relative strength of subnational legislatures from 1999 to 2026 (7 legislatures * 36 states) by relying on media reports. I demonstrate significant differences across states and within states over time and trace the underlying causes by using quantitative and qualitative analysis. I focus specifically on evaluating factors highlighted in the literature as conducive to power concentration: low state-level cultural diversity, lack of economic diversification, large size of the public sector in the economy, and the presence of oil resources. I also investigate the impact of governor term and incumbency (dis)congruence between state and federal levels.