Legislative Turnover in Nigeria: A Cross Examination of States’ Houses of Assembly (2011-2015)

Abstract

Legislative turnover is one of the central issues in the legislative studies but little attention is given to it both in developed and developing democracies. Where the concept is studied, focus is usually on national at the expense of sub-national legislatures. Most of the works are also single-case study neglecting the novelty of comparative discourse. It is against this backdrop that this paper attempts to study the concept in Nigeria’s sub-national level with a view to identifying the variations, causality and its implications on legislative effectiveness. In the wake of the multitude of calculative models, the author drew inspiration from the MLRL model to develop a model suitable to the specificity of Nigeria case. The paper seeks to achieve four objectives chiefly which are to find out how much turnover actually occurred in the Nigerian state legislatures in 2011-2015 and to state whether or not the turnover rate is proper or beneficial for the political system. Using quantitative method, the paper established that high turnover is recorded in almost all the 36 states’ Houses of Assembly caused by lack of internal party democracy and god-fatherism, rotational candidacy, increased political consciousness among others. The paper concluded that the high turnover rate recorded is injurious to legislative effectiveness and recommended that a substantial number of experienced legislators needed to be retained not only to train the new ones but also for institutional memory retention.