Digital politics without context: toward a West African digital politics framework

Digital politics scholarship has produced foundational frameworks grounded in Northern political communication conditions: stable broadband connectivity, publicly visible platforms, partisan political identity, and relatively direct individual participation. These conditions do not describe how digital politics works across West Africa. This paper proposes a West African Digital Politics Framework as a theoretically grounded corrective, developed through a critical integrative review of secondary evidence from across the sub-region. The framework consists of six connected propositions: platform ecosystem realism, political identity pluralism, infrastructure sensitivity, digital authoritarianism, political mediation realism, and gendered digital political participation. The propositions are mutually reinforcing, non-additive conditions that together constitute a configurational system in which each shapes how the others operate. The framework advances digital politics scholarship by demonstrating that the field’s foundational assumptions are contextually specific rather than universal, generating a primary research program for one sub-region of over 400 million people, and carrying direct implications for platform governance, counter-disinformation practice, and civic digital literacy.