Ideology and Communicative Practices in Nigerian Town Hall Meetings: An Ethnographic Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This study investigates ideology and communicative practices in Nigerian town hall meetings using an Ethnographic Critical Discourse Analysis (ECDA) framework. Town hall meetings are commonly presented as democratic platforms that encourage interaction between political office holders and citizens; however, communicative exchanges within these forums often reveal underlying ideological structures and unequal power relations. The study examines how discourse functions as a medium through which political authority, participation, legitimacy, and accountability are negotiated in contemporary Nigerian civic engagement. The study is anchored on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of discourse, van Dijk’s socio-cognitive theory of ideology, and Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach within an ethnographic orientation. Ten discourse extracts from selected Nigerian town hall meetings involving government officials, moderators, and citizens were purposively selected and analyzed. Attention was given to linguistic and interactional features such as turn-taking, topic control, modality, mitigation, interruption, participant positioning, and discourse management strategies. Findings reveal that communicative practices in Nigerian town hall meetings are characterized by institutional regulation and interactional asymmetry. Moderators frequently control participation through turn allocation and speaking restrictions, while government officials dominate discourse through strategies of abstraction, temporal deferral, mitigation, and technocratic framing. Citizens, on the other hand, largely employ experiential and interrogative discourse to express dissatisfaction and demand accountability. The analysis further shows that ideological meanings are reproduced through strategic linguistic choices that legitimize political authority while minimizing governance failures. The study concludes that Nigerian town hall meetings function not as ideologically neutral democratic spaces but as structured communicative arenas where discourse is strategically managed to sustain institutional legitimacy and regulate public participation. By integrating ethnographic observation with Critical Discourse Analysis, the study contributes to scholarship on political communication, civic discourse, and democratic participation in Nigeria, while extending ECDA to the study of interactive political engagement in African contexts.