Reconnecting parliament and citizens: the conditions for institutionalising participation in Nigeria’s Tenth House of representatives

Abstract

Legislatures worldwide face declining trust and rising demands for openness, yet more is known about whether reform matters than about the conditions under which it embeds rather than remaining symbolic. Through Nigeria's Tenth House of Representatives, which since 2023 has sought to reposition parliament as accessible and participatory, this article asks what distinguishes embedded participation from participation that merely performs openness. Using insider documentary analysis, it assesses four reform strategies, transparency and visibility, strategic communication, youth civic pipelines, and inclusive representation, against the Inter-Parliamentary Union's Indicators for Democratic Parliaments, triangulated against independent sources. The House has institutionalised participation on the input and visibility side, through convening, broadcasting and access, but not on the feedback side, where citizen input seldom shapes outcomes. From this asymmetry, it derives four conditions for institutionalisation, leadership sponsorship, procedural linkage, feedback loops, and statutory anchoring, and argues the last two are where reform most often stalls.