Protecting or Threatening Electoral Integrity? Citizen's Attitude Towards State's Electoral Security Provision in Non-consolidated Democracies

In non-consolidated democracies governments implement increased security measures in the lead up to and during elections, deploying security forces to safeguard electoral integrity. At the same time, the state often uses security forces instrumentally to increase its own electoral fortunes. This presents a paradox: the state’s coercive agents that are best placed to protect electoral integrity might also be its' greatest source of threat. How do citizens perceive the state security forces' dual role in the electoral environment, and how do these perceptions impact citizens' evaluation of election quality? We propose that citizens navigate and make trade-offs between several aspects, including contextual level factors and their own social and political identities, that determine vulnerability to biased state actions in the electoral environment. To examine these questions, we use data from a multi-factorial vignette experiment embedded in a survey of 2700 Nigerian citizens fielded after the 2023 presidential elections.