In Afrobarometer Round 10, fielded by NOIPolls in June and July 2024, 92.8% of Nigerian adults said the country was going in the wrong direction, 64.0% still said democracy is preferable to any other kind of government, and 72.8% said corruption had increased a lot in the past year. All three figures come from a free, nationally representative dataset of 1,600 respondents that a political science student can download, cross-tabulate by zone and cite in Chapter Four without collecting a single questionnaire.
That dataset is one of seven sources this article checks, on 30 August 2026, for what each one actually holds for Nigeria, how it is accessed, and which chapter of a project it belongs in. The generic sources every Nigerian project cites, the National Bureau of Statistics and the World Bank indicator API, are covered from the economics side in the guide to where economics students get data for a project; this page is the political science layer on top of that.
The seven sources, and what each one holds for Nigeria
| Source | What it holds | Nigeria coverage (checked 30 August 2026) | Access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Afrobarometer | Face-to-face public opinion surveys on democracy, governance, corruption, services | Round 10: 1,600 adults, June to July 2024, margin of error ±2.5 points at 95% confidence; Nigeria surveyed in every round since 1999 | Free: online data analysis tool, per-country datasets, merged datasets and codebooks |
| INEC results portal | Official election results by election type, polling unit result sheets (IReV), register of parties and candidates | 2023 general elections and subsequent off-cycle elections | Free, no login, at inecelectionresults.ng |
| ACLED | Event-level data on political violence and protest: date, location, actors, fatalities | Near-real-time coverage of Nigeria | Registration through a myACLED account |
| V-Dem | Expert-coded democracy indices and indicators by country-year | Version 16, published March 2026: 531 indicators and 251 indices | Free download under CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Worldwide Governance Indicators | Six governance dimensions by country-year | More than 200 economies, 1996 to 2024; 2025 edition recalculated back to 1996 | Free: data portal, Excel and Stata files |
| Transparency International CPI | Perceived public-sector corruption, one score per country per year | CPI 2025: Nigeria 26 out of 100, rank 142 of 182, no change on the year | Free |
| Freedom House, Freedom in the World | Political rights and civil liberties scores and status | 2025 edition: Nigeria 44 out of 100 (political rights 20 of 40, civil liberties 24 of 60), Partly Free | Free country report |
One line for the background of the study: the National Bureau of Statistics site at nigerianstat.gov.ng, which refused connections outright during earlier checks this month, answered on 30 August 2026 with a data release calendar and a notice of the 2025 to 2026 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. Check it on the day you need it, and keep the Afrobarometer and World Bank files as the fallback.
What Afrobarometer Round 10 says about Nigeria, in the figures a project can open with
The Round 10 summary of results for Nigeria, compiled by NOIPolls and published by Afrobarometer in 2025, reports every question by urban and rural residence and by gender. The totals below are the national figures from that document.
| Question (Round 10, 2024) | National figure | Project area it opens |
|---|---|---|
| Country going in the wrong direction | 92.8% | Government performance, legitimacy |
| Present economic condition of the country very bad or fairly bad | 67.4% very bad, 20.9% fairly bad | Political economy, voting behaviour |
| Democracy is preferable to any other kind of government | 64.0% | Democratic consolidation |
| Nigeria is a democracy with major problems | 53.7% | Democratic quality |
| Leaders should be chosen through regular, open and honest elections | 73.8% | Electoral politics |
| Many political parties are needed for real choice | 59.9% | Party systems |
| Voted in the 2023 national election (self-reported) | 73.4% urban, 75.2% rural | Turnout and participation |
| Trust the President not at all | 41.8% | Political trust |
| Trust INEC not at all | 47.6% | Electoral administration |
| Members of Parliament never listen to ordinary people | 61.5% | Representation, accountability |
| Corruption increased a lot in the past year | 72.8% | Anti-corruption policy |
| Ordinary people risk retaliation for reporting corruption | 87.9% | Whistle-blowing, rule of law |
| News media not very free or not at all free | 46.6% and 12.9% | Press freedom |
| Joined others to request action from government in the past year | 17.7% (once or twice, several times, or often) | Civic participation |
Two of these are worth a whole project on their own. Self-reported voting of roughly three-quarters sits far above the 26.7% turnout INEC declared for the 2023 presidential election, and the gap between what people say and what the returns show is a classic political behaviour question with both datasets already public. And the 87.9% who say reporting corruption risks retaliation is the number that explains most of the anti-corruption literature’s findings on reporting rates in Nigeria.
How to get a zonal breakdown, and why a state breakdown is not there
The online data analysis tool lets you choose Nigeria, a round and a question, then cross the result by a demographic variable: region, urban or rural, gender, age group, education. The technical information form for Round 10 states that the sample was stratified by region and urban-rural location and allocated using the National Population Commission’s 2024 adult population projection, because no census has been conducted since 2006. Stratification by region means the six geopolitical zones are the finest level the design supports; 1,600 respondents spread over 36 states and the FCT gives about 43 per state, which is a sample no panel will accept as a state estimate. Write the comparison at zone level, say why, and you have pre-empted the first methodology question at defence.
If your topic needs one state, Afrobarometer is the national background and your own survey is the instrument. The population figure, the sample size formula and the multi-stage procedure are the ordinary ones from the guide to writing Chapter Three section by section, and the choice between paper and phone collection is compared in Google Forms versus KoboToolbox for project data. Borrow the Afrobarometer question wording for your instrument, cite the questionnaire as its source, and your Chapter Four can put your state’s figure beside the national one.
What the index scores measure, and the design mistake they invite
The CPI, Freedom in the World, the Worldwide Governance Indicators and V-Dem each give Nigeria one number per year. The CPI is a perception score on a 0 to 100 scale, and Nigeria’s 26 in the 2025 index with a rank of 142 of 182 belongs in the background of the study, cited with the year, and nowhere else. Freedom in the World’s 44 of 100 and Partly Free status is the same kind of figure. The Worldwide Governance Indicators publish six dimensions, Voice and Accountability, Political Stability, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law and Control of Corruption, as estimates in standard statistical units and, since the 2025 edition, as scores on an absolute 0 to 100 scale anchored to fixed reference points, with the historical series recalculated back to 1996. V-Dem’s version 16 goes further, with 531 indicators and 251 indices per country-year, which is why it is the source for a project on a specific institution such as legislative constraints on the executive or judicial independence.
The mistake is to regress one of these on another for Nigeria alone. A single-country series of annual index values gives you fewer than 30 observations from 1996, most of them moving by a point or two, and a panel will ask what a coefficient on such a series means. The designs these indices support are cross-national (Nigeria against Ghana, Kenya and South Africa on the same index over the same years) or descriptive (the trend of one WGI dimension across four administrations, with the presidential terms marked). The answer to which statistical test a final year project should use covers the tests that fit each of those designs.
Election data: what the INEC portal gives and what it does not
The INEC results portal publishes official results by election type and, through the result viewing portal IReV, the scanned polling unit result sheets. For a project on voting patterns, that is the source for the state and local government totals, and the portal’s candidates and parties section is the register of who contested. What the portal does not give is a clean downloadable table across all elections; you will assemble the state-level figures yourself and place the table in the appendix with the retrieval date, because results pages change as tribunals rule. Pair the returns with the Afrobarometer participation items and the design writes itself: reported versus recorded turnout by zone, with the gap as the dependent variable.
Conflict and security data: ACLED event files
For a topic on banditry, insurgency, farmer-herder conflict or protest, ACLED is the dataset the published literature uses. It records individual events with date, location down to the town, actor types and reported fatalities, in near real time, and access is through a registered myACLED account. The design that fits an undergraduate project is descriptive and temporal: events per month in a named state or zone over a defined period, or the change in event type before and after a named policy. Cite the download date and the event-type definitions from ACLED’s methodology pages, because both change, and state in Chapter Three that fatality counts are reported figures, not verified ones.
How to cite each source in APA 7th
Reference list entries, in the order a Chapter One background usually uses them:
- Afrobarometer. (2025). Afrobarometer Round 10 survey in Nigeria, 2024: Summary of results. Compiled by NOIPolls. Afrobarometer.
- Independent National Electoral Commission. (2023). 2023 general election results [Data set]. INEC. Retrieved [date], from the INEC election results portal.
- Armed Conflict Location and Event Data. (2026). ACLED data: Nigeria, [start date] to [end date] [Data set]. Retrieved [date].
- Coppedge, M., et al. (2026). V-Dem dataset v16 [Data set]. Varieties of Democracy Institute.
- World Bank. (2025). Worldwide Governance Indicators, 2025 update [Data set]. World Bank.
- Transparency International. (2026). Corruption Perceptions Index 2025. Transparency International.
- Freedom House. (2025). Freedom in the World 2025: Nigeria. Freedom House.
Confirm the author lists and publication years against each source’s own suggested citation before you bind; V-Dem and ACLED both publish one, and a panel member who uses the dataset will know it. The referencing style your department requires, and how the seven-style menu works, is in the guide to which referencing style Nigerian universities use.
Which source fits which project design
| Project topic | Primary source | Design | Chapter Four output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public trust in INEC and electoral participation | Afrobarometer R10 plus INEC returns | Cross-tabulation by zone; descriptive comparison | Frequency tables, chi-square by zone |
| Democratic consolidation since 1999 | Afrobarometer rounds since 1999; V-Dem indices | Trend analysis by round | Line chart of support for democracy, index trend |
| Anti-corruption agencies and public perception | Afrobarometer corruption items; CPI for background | Descriptive survey plus own questionnaire in one state | National versus state figures side by side |
| Insecurity and governance in a named zone | ACLED events; WGI Political Stability for background | Temporal descriptive analysis | Events per month, event type by state |
| Nigeria compared with Ghana and Kenya on rule of law | WGI and V-Dem | Cross-national comparison | Three-country index table, 2014 to 2024 |
Before you commit to any of these, count the Nigerian literature on it; the method for turning an OpenAlex count into a gap statement is in the guide to whether your project topic has already been studied in Nigeria.
Put the figures into Chapter One tonight
Tesify drafts the background of the study around the Afrobarometer, CPI and Freedom House figures you paste in, with each one attributed to its source and year, and drafts the data-source paragraph of Chapter Three for a secondary-data design. The automatic bibliography formats the dataset citations in APA 7th. There is a free plan and no card is required.
Frequently asked questions
Where do political science students get data for a project in Nigeria?
Afrobarometer for public opinion, the INEC results portal for election returns, ACLED for conflict events, V-Dem and the Worldwide Governance Indicators for institutional measures, and the Corruption Perceptions Index and Freedom in the World for background scores. All are free except ACLED, which needs a registered account.
Is Afrobarometer data free?
Yes. The online data analysis tool, the per-country datasets, the merged datasets and the codebooks are provided free, subject to the data usage and access policy published on the Afrobarometer site.
How many people were surveyed in Nigeria in Afrobarometer Round 10?
1,600 adult citizens, interviewed face to face by NOIPolls in June and July 2024, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
Can I break Afrobarometer results down by state?
No. The sample is stratified by region and urban-rural location, so the six geopolitical zones are the finest breakdown the design supports. About 43 respondents per state is not a state estimate.
What is Nigeria’s score on the Corruption Perceptions Index?
26 out of 100 in the 2025 index, ranked 142 of 182 countries and territories, unchanged from the previous year, according to Transparency International’s Nigeria page.
Is Nigeria rated Free or Partly Free by Freedom House?
Partly Free in Freedom in the World 2025, with a total score of 44 out of 100: 20 of 40 for political rights and 24 of 60 for civil liberties.
Can I use the CPI or WGI as a variable in a regression for Nigeria alone?
It is not advisable. A single-country annual series gives fewer than 30 observations that barely move, so the coefficient has no defensible meaning. Use the indices for cross-national comparison or for a descriptive trend, and use survey microdata for inferential tests.
Where do I get election results for a Nigerian project?
From the INEC results portal, which publishes official results by election type and polling unit result sheets through IReV. Assemble the state totals into your own appendix table and record the retrieval date.
Is the National Bureau of Statistics website working?
On 30 August 2026 it answered normally, with a data release calendar; earlier in the month it refused connections. Check it on the day you need it and keep a downloaded copy of any table you cite.