Sources of political information in a rural Nigerian community

In any election year, the myriad of political communication messages that individual voters are daily exposed to provides a potentially bewildering competitive climate for opinion formation, attitude change and/or behaviour modification. Not only in news bulletins, but also through paid advertisements and interpersonal discussions, the individual voter seems to be drowning in a sea of political information, some of which must be structured in order to make sense of the usually highly inflationary election information. As Atwood and Sanders (1975:421) noted, 'If the individual is to avoid being overwhelmed, he must somehow organize these stimuli into broad classifications that can accommodate familiar and unfamiliar elements without undue efforts.