We are grateful to the Folke Bernadotte Academy, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and the Research Programme Democracy and Higher Education for funding the project and data collection.

➡️ Nigerians have more positive evaluations of electoral security provision by state security forces compared to non-state security providers, with a substantial proportion of respondents perceiving that both actors are biased and act on behalf of the government.

➡️ More than half of the people we talked to report low levels of trust in the election. This number is higher for opposition party supporters and individuals with tertiary education.

➡️ Nigerians across the surveyed states have significant experience with election violence and malpractices, with opposition party supporters and the well-educated reporting higher exposure.

📊 Right after the 2023 general election, we asked 2,800 Nigerians across 5 states what they think about electoral security providers, as well as their experiences with electoral irregularities and violence. We also mapped how partisanship and education shape these views. This is what we find:

Fantastic! Could you please add me, as well.

We are grateful to the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation for funding this project!

We have received so much useful comments over the years from too many people to be mentioned here, but would like to thank in particular 3 anonymous reviewers, the editor, Francesca R. Jensenius, @matanock.bsky.social, @jordimunoz.bsky.social, and @ascharpf.bsky.social!

✅ Our findings shed light on the dynamics of democratic retrenchment in weak democracies, highlighting that politically marginalized groups might be the ones who most carefully navigate trade-offs between democratic rights and security.

📊 We find that a heavy state-military presence prime makes citizens more reluctant to accept restrictions on democratic right, but only among politically marginalized groups. In the presence of violent non-state threats citizens become more likely to support policies that curtail democratic rights.

To test this, we conducted a 2019 post-election survey with a vignette experiment on 1,080 Indian citizens in two insurgency-affected states.

The display of state coercive force during elections should make citizens more likely to protect democratic rights, but if it occurs in contexts of non-state threats, citizens may become more likely to accept that rights are restricted.

We argue that citizens weigh competing threats when forming opinions on the appropriate limit to state powers.

Many citizens worldwide vote amid armed threats from state and non-state actors. Yet, little is known about how such militarized elections shape citizens’ support for restrictions on democratic rights.