Sarah Birch 'Evolution of electoral integrity in democracies and autocracies' 12 Aug2014
Channel: Electoral Integrity Project
Date: 2014-08-26

Download the paper at: http://bit.ly/1vJfYNu

Professor Sarah Birch talks about how electoral reform and electoral protest dynamics play out in democracies and autocracies.


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Synopsis: Popular protests following elections in electoral authoritarian states have become more common in recent years, yet few studies have analyzed this phenomenon. This paper draws 
on the literatures on contentious politics and electoral integrity to provide a novel account of post-electoral protest. The main argument is that because in the wake of the ‘third wave’ of 
democratization, the politics of electoral reform revolves mainly around the implementation of democratic electoral principles rather than around the principles themselves, electoral authoritarian leaders tend to employ forms of electoral abuse that entail giving unfair advantage to pro-regime electoral competitors, rather than excluding either voters or competitors from the electoral arena altogether. This means that citizens have electoral rights formally accorded to them but episodically abused, a pattern which is conducive to generating grievance. When such regimes ramp up forms of manipulation that favor pro-regime political forces, the resultant deterioration in election quality can then serve as a focal point which serves to mobilize citizens to mount mass protests. In as much as protest can, under the right circumstances, lead to reforms which improve electoral integrity, one of the implications of this argument is that elections often have to get worse before they get better.



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The Electoral Integrity Project is an independent research team based at the University of Sydney and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. It explores many issues, focusing upon three main questions: 

- When do elections meet international standards of electoral integrity? 
- What happens when elections fail to do so? 
- And what can be done to mitigate these problems? 

For more information see: www.electoralintegrityproject.com