Climate Change in African Electoral Discourse: Data and Replication Files for South Africa (2024) and Nigeria (2023) Elections

This living repository contains supplementary materials for a multi-phase project investigating the salience of climate change in electoral discourse across African democracies, focusing on South Africa's 2024 national election and Nigeria's 2023 presidential election. The project examines how climate change competes for attention with other policy issues during national elections, using BERTopic modelling combined with issue-salience and issue-competition frameworks.Open Science CommitmentAll raw data, processing scripts, analytical code, and outputs are included to enable independent verification and replication. Full repository structure, folder-by-folder contents, and technical specifications are documented in the accompanying README file.Project StructurePhase 1 (completed): South Africa's 2024 national electionPhase 2 (completed): Nigeria's 2023 presidential electionPhase 3 (forthcoming): Cross-country comparative analysisCurrent Status (Version 2.0 – July 2026)Complete materials for Phases 1 and 2 are included, supporting two stand-alone empirical papers and providing the analytical foundation for the forthcoming comparative study:South Africa: Crowded Out: Climate Change in South Africa's 2024 National Election Discourse (under review, African Journalism Studies)Nigeria: The Missing Climate: Issue Competition and Structural Invisibility in Nigeria's 2023 Electoral Agenda (published in Environmental Research Communications)Repository ContentsEach country package (SA_Data_&_Research_Files.zip, NG_Data_&_Research_Files.zip) follows the same six-stage workflow — raw data and inputs, BERTopic modelling code, model outputs, salience-computation code, salience scores, and analysis/visualisation outputs. See the README for the complete file inventory, folder structure, and technical specifications (software, embedding model, analytical framework).