Word.ws English Dictionary

godfatherism

godfatherism noun: a form of political corruption in which an influential individual handpicks another, often less influential candidate, to attain leadership in order to exert authority or influence. This may be due to the unpopularity of one candidate, or to work around incumbency term limits.

Noun

godfatherism (uncountable)

  1. (Nigeria) A form of political corruption in which an influential individual handpicks another, often less influential candidate, to attain leadership in order to exert authority or influence. This may be due to the unpopularity of one candidate, or to work around incumbency term limits.

Origin of godfatherism

From godfather + -ism.

Questions about godfatherism

What does godfatherism mean?
Godfatherism means a form of political corruption in which an influential individual handpicks another, often less influential candidate, to attain leadership in order to exert authority or influence. This may be due to the unpopularity of one candidate, or to work around incumbency term limits.
What part of speech is godfatherism?
Godfatherism is a noun.

Words near godfatherism in the dictionary

  1. godfamily
  2. godfather
  3. godfathered
  4. godfatherhood
  5. godfathering
  6. godfatherism
  7. godfatherless
  8. godfatherlike
  9. godfatherly
  10. godfathers
  11. godfathership

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: godfatherism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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