Between Six and Half a Dozen: A Comparative Functional Analysis of Televised Political Advertisements of Incumbent Versus Challenger in the 2019 Presidential Election Campaigns in Nigeria

This study is a functional analysis of APC, and PDP political advertisements in the 2019 presidential election in Nigeria. The study adopted a descriptive qualitative design with data collected from purposively selected NTA, AIT, TVC, and Channels which were the four major television networks in Nigeria in 2019. A population of 58 political advertisements were generated from the four television networks. The Australian online sample size calculator was used to determine the sample size of 50, at 95% CL and 0.5 CI. Twenty five political advertisements were randomly selected from APC, and PDP and randomly assigned to two graduate coders without political affiliation through number picks. Coder A coded 13 APC and 12 PDP while coder B coded 12 APC and 13 PDP political advertisements respectively. The coders achieved inter-coder reliability co-efficient of .80 on topic, and .82 on function respectively on Cohen’s kappa. Findings revealed the dominance of acclaims over attacks for both the incumbent (APC) and the challenger (PDP) contrary to previous findings. Despite this, PDP as the challenger still acclaimed less, attacked more, and defended less while APC, as the incumbent, acclaimed more, attacked less, and defended more. Topical analysis showed both APC, and PDP were more focused on image than policy contrary to previous findings for both incumbents and challengers which validates the development gap hypothesis. The study was anchored on the Functional Analysis Theory of Political Campaign Discuss (FATPCD).