Digital Political Discourse in Nigeria: An Examination of Relational Work and Ethics in Selected 2023 Presidential Election Spokespersons’ Utterances

Abstract

This study looks into the relational work and ethical responsibility within the social media messages of spokespersons of the three major political parties in Nigeria in the 2023 general elections. Based on fifteen purposively sampled posts by the representatives of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the Labour Party (LP) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on X (formerly Twitter), the study examines linguistic behaviour using the relational work framework proposed by Locher and Watts (2005) and the Theory of Communicative Action by Habermas (1984). The findings highlight a core conflict between strategic partisan communication and the communicative ethics required by the discourse of democracy, and the pressing question of the quality of political language in the digital realm of Nigerian politics is raised. The study concludes that negatively marked, offensive, and face-threatening statements are dominant in all the three parties, and the ethical breaches of unverified accusations, criminalising labels, inflammatory metaphors, and ad hominem attacks are the norm but not the exception in rhetoric. The positively marked politeness strategies, though existing, are mostly limited to in-group solidarity and rarely to the rival parties and electoral institutions.