The missing climate: issue competition and structural invisibility in Nigeria’s 2023 electoral agenda

Abstract

Abstract Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election constituted a ‘most likely’ case for climate politicization: it followed devastating floods affecting 34 of Nigeria’s 36 states, unfolded against the backdrop of COP27 in neighbouring Egypt, and occurred during the first full electoral cycle after the Climate Change Act entered force. Yet contemporaneous commentary suggested that electoral debate remained dominated by economic hardship, insecurity, and corruption. This study examines whether acute vulnerability and recent policy advances elevated climate change onto Nigeria’s electoral agenda or whether structural constraints continued to render it politically marginal. Drawing on agenda-setting and issue-salience theories, we apply zero-shot BERTopic modelling and an issue-competition framework to analyse the relative salience of climate change across party manifestos, campaign speeches, and newspaper coverage. The analysis shows that climate change ranked 11th of 17 identified issue categories ( S = 0.23), below ethnic and identity appeals, food security, and infrastructure. Despite food security ranking third, climate change scored approximately 48% lower ( S = 0.23), indicating an attribution gap in which climate-affected outcomes were discussed without explicit climate framing. Climate achieved modest salience in manifestos, failed to register in campaign speeches, and re-emerged unevenly in media coverage, suggesting a broader pattern of programmatic acknowledgement without performative politicization. No party demonstrated climate issue ownership, and correlation analysis revealed strong crowding-out by democracy discourse and missed integration with food security. These findings suggest that in resource-dependent democracies, structural political economy constraints may outweigh temporal opportunities, helping to explain why ambitious climate policies coexist with persistent electoral invisibility.