‘The legislature is the engine room of democracy’: Constructing ideological worldviews through proximisation strategies in Nigerian Senate debates

Abstract

This study investigates how legislators utilise proximisation strategies to construct ideological worldviews in Nigerian Senate debates about democratic consolidation and the legitimacy of the legislature. For data, samples were purposively drawn from a 1.9 million-word corpus of Nigerian Senate debates constructed for a broader research and subjected to qualitative discourse analysis. The analysis reveals that legislators’ discursive acts prompt the conceptual organisation of the discourse space such that the activities of the executive are construed to be inimical to democratic consolidation and the legitimacy of the legislature, whereas legislators construe themselves positively as resilient defenders of democracy and the legislative institution. Through proximisation strategies, legislators engage in the ideological discourse of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation relative to the executive. This paper contributes to our understanding of the tenuous and polarised relationship amongst arms of government under a presidential political system in an emerging democracy.