Students' Attitude towards Political Participation and Democratic Values in Nigeria: Critical Democracy Education Implications

Abstract

This study investigated the attitudes of university students toward political participation, as well as four other selected democratic values – freedom and liberty, human rights/human rights protest, corruption resistance, and separation of powers in Nigeria. A descriptive survey design, with a tool entitled ‘Attitude towards Democratic Values Questionnaire (ADVQ)’, was used to collect data from randomly selected 250 undergraduate students (male = 120; female = 130) from a university in Nigeria. Six research questions were answered using descriptive statistics in guiding the study. The results showed that university students reported an unwillingness to protest human rights violations as well as the tendency to accept bribes and campaign for a wrong political candidate for financial gains, despite general findings that indicated positive attitudes towards all selected democratic values among university students. The result of the variance analysis conducted to ascertain the influence of gender on attitudes towards democratic values showed that female students scored significantly higher than their male counterparts in all measured democratic principles, excepting human rights and separation of powers. Implications of findings for a critical democratic education that emphasises critical consciousness, spatial voting, and socio-political resilience are discussed.