First Chapter: Why Elections Fail by Pippa Norris
By: Harvard Ash Center
Tags: Politics, Operations, Voting, Elections, Department Of Justice

Below is an excerpt from Pippa Norris’s book, Why Elections Fail. Paul. F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at HKS, Pippa Norris is a long-time friend and Faculty Affiliate of the Ash Center, where she gave a book-talk last fall.

Electoral integrity, the set of international norms governing the appropriate conduct of elections, is more complex than the popular focus on ballot stuffing and vote buying. In Why Elections Fail, Norris argues that the rules preventing political actors from manipulating electoral governance are needed to secure integrity, although at the same time, officials need sufficient resources and capacities to manage elections effectively.

In the below excerpt of Why Elections Fail, Norris explores the notion of electoral integrity as derived from human rights treaties, not principles of democracy. Rooted in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1976, electoral integrity has garnered widespread support — even from states such as Russia, China, Syria, and Zimbabwe. However, as with most international norms, electoral integrity suffers from weak enforcement and a slew of interpretations.

Heading the Electoral Integrity Project, Norris explores the results of a new survey that evaluates 113 recent national elections in 97 independent nation states. She unpacks why some elections are far less successful than others in meeting international standards. For example, why are elections in Norway and Iceland rated higher than those in Italy, Japan and the US?

In attempting to theorize why some elections fail, Norris considers the usual suspects: sociological theories, that claim that modernization (economic development, level of education, culture) is key to providing a conducive environment to organizing elections; international relationship theories, which point to the role of multilateral and donor organizations in strengthening democracies through global norms; and power sharing theories, that stress the importance of institutional structures and capacities of a government to shape the performance of electoral authorities.

Listen to the full conversation with Pippa Norris here

Norris also assesses the short and long-term policy implications for each of these theories. She does not consider these theories in a vacuum. Rather, they are part of a comprehensive framework in which both structural conditions and international forces affect conditions for electoral integrity. Equipped with this new vision, Norris offers an enriched roadmap for practitioners seeking to strengthen electoral integrity around the world.

This post is part of an occasional series highlighting the first chapters of recent books by speakers and participants in the Challenges to Democracy series. Many thanks to the Cambridge University Press for allowing us to re-print the first chapter of Why Elections Fail.

INTRODUCTION: WHY DO ELECTIONS FAIL?

Numerous types of flaws and failures undermine elections. In some, opponents are disqualified. District boundaries are gerrymandered. Campaigns provide a skewed playing field for parties. Independent media are muzzled. Citizens are ill-informed about choices. Balloting is disrupted by bloodshed. Ballot boxes are stuffed. Vote counts are fiddled. Opposition parties withdraw. Contenders refuse to accept the people’s choice. Protests disrupt polling. Officials abuse state resources. Electoral registers are out of date. Candidates distribute largesse. Votes are bought. Airwaves favor incumbents. Campaigns are awash with hidden cash. Political finance rules are lax. Incompetent local officials run out of ballot papers. Incumbents are immune from effective challengers. Rallies trigger riots. Women candidates face discrimination. Ethnic minorities are persecuted. Voting machines jam. Lines lengthen. Ballot box seals break. Citizens cast more than one ballot. Laws suppress voting rights. Polling stations are inaccessible. Software crashes. “Secure” ink washes off fingers. Courts fail to resolve complaints impartially. Each of these problems can generate contentious elections characterized by lengthy court challenges, opposition boycotts, public protest, or, at worst, deadly violence. In some, failures are intentional; elsewhere, they arise through happenstance, although it is tricky to nail down which is which.

Today all but a handful of countries around the world hold parliamentary elections, but contests can be marred by all these problems — and many more. Flaws corrode democratic governance. As the previous book in this trilogy demonstrated, lack of integrity has many serious consequences, with the capacity to undermine the legitimacy of elected authorities, to erode satisfaction with democracy, to reduce public confidence in political parties and parliaments, and to weaken electoral turnout. Violent protests can destabilize states, especially in hybrid regimes lacking the coercive powers of absolute autocracies and the legitimacy of mature democracies. In emerging economies such as Kenya and Thailand, disputed procedures have generated instability and undermined investor confidence. Competitive multiparty elections are the bed- rock for democratic accountability, linking citizens and the state, empowering electors to “throw the rascals out” if dissatisfied by unpopular leaders. Where contentious elections are seriously flawed, or even failed, however, this mechanism is far from sufficient to rid the world of corrupt, venal, or incompetent rulers, prompting critical citizens to resort to the barricades rather than ballots. The vertical chain of electoral accountability linking citizens and authorities becomes corroded or broken. Elections alone are not sufficient guarantees for democratic governance, where other horizontal channels of public account- ability remain weak, but they remain the foundation.

To understand these issues, the first part of this chapter presents the conceptual framework and evidence used to compare electoral integrity around the world. The second part outlines the theoretical argument and the roadmap for the rest of the book.

I: The Concept of Electoral Integrity

The core notions of “flawed” or “failed” elections, which lie at the heart of this book, require clear standards and consistent benchmarks against which to judge the quality of any contest. To lay the groundwork, as conceptualized and defined by this trilogy, the overarching notion of electoral integrity refers to contests respecting international standards and global norms governing the appropriate conduct of elections. These standards have been endorsed in a series of authoritative conventions, treaties, protocols, case laws, and guide- lines by agencies of the international community. Authority derives primarily from resolutions and treaties passed by the UN General Assembly, the UN Security Council, and UN human rights bodies, supplemented by agreement reaching within regional intergovernmental bodies such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the African Union (AU), and the European Union.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provides the broadest guarantees of the rights to political participation, including the right to self-determination (Article 1) and the right for everyone to take part in the running of the public affairs of his/her country (Article 25), among others. The treaty has been in effect since 1976 and today 168 countries, out of 193 UN member states, are parties, including the Russian Federation, China, Syria, Belarus, and Zimbabwe. Following ratification, international standards apply universally to all endorsing countries throughout the electoral cycle, providing legal obligations for states, including during the preelectoral period, the campaign, on polling day, and in its aftermath. Treaties formalize agreement among sovereign states. As in any binding contract, upon endorsement states voluntarily limit their sovereignty by accepting international obligations. Of course, in many cases endorsement may simply exist on paper, and electoral rights continue to be repressed, if countries sign to avoid punishments for not going along with the international community, without experiencing any effective sanctions for non-compliance. Critics charge that many basic principles are widely flouted, and even some established democracies transgress, where the lofty language of human rights is coupled with weak enforcement mechanisms. Many factors may influence how far states act in accordance with their treaty obligations, including international pressures and institutions, the prior values and preferences of particular governments, the capacity of the courts, and the strength of local human rights activists. One of the main reasons why ratification strengthens human rights is through domestic mechanisms; endorsement of international treaties empowers citizens to pressure government to meet their international obligations. Where the world has agreed on the legitimacy of certain minimal standards of electoral rights, then activists can appeal to these principles when organizing to protest against domination and oppression. Survey evidence demonstrates that citizens’ demands for democracy and human rights are universal today, although there is also widespread dissatisfaction about how far states observe these principles in practice, generating an expectation gap. Transitions from autocracy, and the expansion of competitive elections around the world, have strengthened the public’s capacity to mobilize when challenging power. The international community has also become increasingly active, by providing technical assistance and aid to reform movements seeking to strengthen democratic governance. Thus states face growing pressures at home and abroad to realize electoral rights and to respect international jurisprudence. How abstract principles are interpreted and translated into domestic laws and administrative procedures, however, is a complex process. Textual interpretations differ among countries and cultures, so that what one society regards as appropriate standards may be seen elsewhere to violate fundamental human rights — such as practices concerning whether polling should be voluntary or compulsory, whether registration should be an individual or state initiative, or whether voter identification should be required to be presented before casting a ballot. The notion of “electoral integrity” founded on international human rights agreements is therefore far more powerful, comprehensive, and complex than the popular focus on electoral fraud, implying specific malpractices occurring on polling day such as illicit acts of ballot stuffing, vote-buying, or rigging the count.

What electoral rights are recognized in international treaties? International IDEA, working in conjunction with the Carter Center, has compiled the most comprehensive and systematic set of obligations derived from international jurisprudence, as listed in Table 1.1. The foundation for these standards rests upon Article 21(3) in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR 1948). This specifies that “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.” This statement has become the blueprint for subsequent standards. Agreement about the norms governing the conduct of elections was further specified in Article 25 of the UN International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR of 1966), which came into force a decade later. International standards continued to evolve, including through international conventions on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination (ICERD 1966) and discrimination against women (CEDAW, 1979), the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC 2003), the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD 2006), as well as agreements secured in the 1990 Copenhagen Document of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and the 2002 Venice Commission’s Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters.

This framework provides the legal mandate for electoral assistance by UN agencies and bureaus. Until the late 1980s, the role of the UN in elections was mainly to observe, supervise, and sometimes certify the results. After the end of the Cold War, however, the UN’s role expanded in different contests, by pro- viding more aid and technical assistance and also by directly organizing several elections in peacekeeping operations, such as Cambodia in 1993, Namibia in 1989, and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006. The Electoral Assistance Division (UNEAD) in the UN Department of Political Affairs coordinates electoral assistance within the United Nations and formulates policies and guide- lines. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in liaison with UNEAD, serves as the main UN agency that deploys technical assistance and aid when member states request help with the legal, operational, or logistical management of elections. The UNDP reports to its executive body and ultimately works within the broader mandate established by the UN General Assembly. Regional intergovernmental organizations have also expanded their roles in updating electoral standards and issuing practical guidelines, notably for observers to assess the quality of elections, as exemplified by the OSCE Election Observation Handbook.

International standards are not static, however, as illustrated by the evolving language used in the UN General Assembly resolution 63/163 on “Strengthening the role of the United Nations in enhancing periodic and genuine elections and the promotion of democratization” passed every two years since 1988. For example, the agreement on state responsibilities for organizing elections was strengthened in 1991, while the notion of an “electoral cycle” rather than event was added in 1993. Norms continue to evolve at different stages of acceptance, like widening concentric circles rippling from a stone dropped in a pond. The classic international conventions of human rights have been widely internalized today, regarded as appropriate guides to conduct elections around the world. For example, the principle of universal franchise for all citizens is now universally accepted, without restrictions of voting rights based on sex, class, caste, race, ethnicity, disability, or religion. Other standards continue to diffuse around the globe, as more and more countries adopt these norms, exemplified by the spread of gender quotas for elected office following CEDAW in 1979 and the 1990 Beijing Declaration adopting a target of 30 per- cent of seats for women. Yet other canons are not yet entrenched in international jurisprudence, although principles are advocated by norm entrepreneurs, such as those governing political finance regulations proposed by Transparency International, the OAS, and the OSCE.

Thus, in defining what is meant by elections that are free and fair, genuine, or democratic — some of the most commonly used terms in news headlines and observer reports in the international community — accounts typically emphasize a checklist reflecting the classic principles. The International IDEA guidelines identify the twenty international obligations, listed in Table 1.1, which are regarded as the key building blocks. Based on this understanding, states are obliged to protect the voting rights of all citizens, to safeguard opportunities for all candidates and parties to campaign freely, to hold contests at regular intervals, to protect candidates and citizens from threat of political violence or intimidation, to provide transparent processes of electoral administration, and to offer timely and expeditious judicial processes adjudicating complaints and disputes. In practice, however, as mentioned earlier, how these abstract principles translate into national laws and detailed administrative procedures remains a complex process. For example, the concept of a “universal franchise” is widely agreed as a basic human right, yet states continue to differ in their legal definition of citizenship, minimal age requirements, qualifications to vote, and the exclusion of certain categories, such as prisoners or overseas populations. Even greater controversy continues to surround several important issues where there is no global consensus. Normative values clash even among Western democracies, such as the appropriate standards guiding political finance regulations and thus the use of disclosure requirements, spending caps and donor limits, and public funding of political parties. The obligations endorsed in international treaties therefore provide a minimum basis for electoral integrity and, while not absolutely relative, the abstract principles are open to differing legitimate interpretations when translated into national laws and practices.

To clarify the basic foundations, and avoid common misunderstandings, it is worth emphasizing at the outset how this conceptualization differs in several important respects from other common approaches.

Firstly, in this study normative authority is understood to derive from the body of human rights treaties and conventions in the international community; not directly from principles of democracy per se. Thus, while multiparty elections are essential for contestation and participation in liberal democracy, contrary to other scholars, democratic theories are not referenced as the authority for the origins of these ideas. Instead, in line with the approach endorsed by such organizations as the Carter Center and International IDEA, the quality of elections is evaluated by principles and procedures derived from international jurisprudence. As a result, one admitted limitation is that the core concept of electoral integrity used in this study is less coherent than tighter or minimalist scholarly notions, since electoral rights have not been codified in a consistent fashion. One major counterbalancing advantage, however, is that the universality of the concept applies to all independent nation states holding national elections. In practice this means that the empirical analysis measures the quality of national elections held around the world, including in one-party states such as Vietnam and Cuba, as well as in long-established democracies such as Sweden and Canada. Ultimately, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be traced back to underlying notions of democracy reflecting deeply held values among the Western great powers, following the end of the Second World War. But the legitimacy of human rights treaties derives from endorsement by UN member states in the world community, not from political philosophy. Diplomatically, this powerful notion also means that human rights obligations are regarded as legally binding and applicable to autocratic states that have endorsed international treaties even if they reject liberal democratic principles. Analytically, this also means that the book uses global comparisons and it does not focus on any particular regime type. This approach diverges from the conventional literature, which has evolved in two parallel streams during recent decades focused, respectively, upon electoral malpractices through the intentional repression of human rights in hybrid regimes such as Russia and through maladministration in established democracies such as the United States.

The turn of the century saw growing recognition among comparative and area scholars of the persistence of many hybrid regimes that are neither absolute autocracies nor consolidated democracies. The end of the “transition paradigm” spurred renewed attention on how contests function to preserve the power of ruling elites in “electoral authoritarian” regimes in Latin America, Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe. From this perspective, studies assume that the key “puzzle” is to explain why and how ruling parties in these types of regimes intentionally manipulate the outcome to preserve their legitimacy and power within a façade of nominally competitive multiparty contests. The main remedy, from this perspective, lies in how to restrict the abuse of power and fraudulent electoral acts by ruling parties, both domestically through strengthening transparency, accountability, and inclusive participation, as well as externally, from diplomatic pressures, including through the deployment of international observer missions.

By coincidence, in the aftermath of the Florida debacle in the 2000 Gore versus Bush presidential election and the 2002 Help America Vote Act, another distinct stream of literature evolved simultaneously among scholars of American politics with a flood of contemporary studies analyzing the quality of electoral administration in the United States. Drawing upon the disciplines of public sector management and electoral law, political scientists examined the technical problems of organizing and managing American elections, such as flaws in state-level electoral registration, provisional ballots, advance voting, and polling facilities. These problems are conventionally framed as largely managerial issues, where technocratic solutions–better performance indices, legal reforms, and procedural amendments–are typically proposed to improve the efficiency of the electoral process.

By contrast, rather than limiting the comparison to any particular type of regime, this study rejects the assumptions underlying these conventional approaches and adopts a global comparative framework. The book starts from the more agnostic position that electoral malpractices in any country around the globe can arise from limitations of democratic governance, that is to say, from either restrictions on fundamental human rights and violations committed by the regime or its opponents, and/or from lack of state capacity by electoral authorities to manage contests effectively. Democracy and governance should be understood as separate concepts. It remains to be determined empirically whether problems are due to violations of basic human rights or failures of governance, or indeed, in many cases, to some combination of these problems. Established democracies such as the United States are not immune from partisan restrictions of electoral rights, just as many hybrid regimes have limited capacity to run flawless elections. Thus a skeptical approach to the precise reasons behind any electoral malpractices, open to the evidence, is more comprehensive and realistic than starting from the a priori assumption that any flaws must arise either from intentional manipulation or from administrative happenstance and incompetence.

There is another important reason to avoid using levels of democratization or regime types as possible explanations for the quality of elections; namely, this procedure raises serious risks of generating spurious correlations and tautological explanations, since the quality of elections is already baked into most conceptualizations, continuous measures of democratization, and typological classifications of democratic and autocratic regimes. As discussed more fully in the next chapter, the standard continuous concepts and measures of democracy and autocracy generated by Freedom House and Polity IV, as well as dichotomous classifications of democratic and dictatorial regimes, rely heavily upon the quality of elections. Therefore even though the Perception of Electoral Integrity Index is strongly correlated with standard measures of democracy, this book scrutinizes other types of explanations.

Sequential Stages in the Electoral Cycle

The overarching concept of electoral integrity remains highly abstract, so that in practice, to measure and monitor standards, it can be usefully broken down into its component parts. In an influential framework, Andreas Schedler has previously suggested that problems of democratic elections involve a “menu of manipulation” that ranges sequentially in a series of steps, from restrictions on the range of electoral offices through the formation and expression of preferences to the consequences of voting choices for office holders. Conceived in this way, breaking any single link in the process is capable of undermining the legitimacy of elections. Almost a decade ago now, the international community also moved toward understanding that electoral assistance and monitoring should not be focused purely upon election day, or even on the short-term period of the official campaign. Instead, each election should be understood as a cyclical process involving a long series of sequential steps. The idea of an electoral cycle has now become the “gold standard” for the international community seeking to strengthen the capacity of Election Management Bodies and to invest in long-term sustainable development.

To operationalize the core notion, in this book the electoral cycle is deconstructed into a series of eleven sequential steps, illustrated schematically in Figure 1.1. This approach acknowledges that flaws can arise at any stage of the process. This includes from the design of electoral law, such as the use of overly restrictive or cumbersome nomination requirements for gaining ballot access or the adoption of excessively high vote thresholds. Electoral procedures can also be problematic, arising from the actions of partisan or incompetent local officials. Integrity is also undermined by partisan gerrymandering or by malapportionment favoring incumbents in the process of redistricting constituency boundaries. Voter registration processes may exclude many citizens, such as rural or illiterate populations, or specific minority groups, exemplified by inaccurate and incomplete electoral rolls or by intentional acts of voter suppression through onerous requirements. Party and candidate registration processes are also critical, with restrictions illustrated by courts banning specific political par- ties or by regimes imprisoning prominent opposition leaders. Campaign media can fail to provide a level playing field, such as patronage appointments eroding the independence of broadcasting regulatory bodies or uncritical coverage of government officials on state-controlled television channels. Political finance regulations pose another range of challenges, especially lack of equal access to state resources for government and opposition parties. Voting processes in polling places come under considerable scrutiny, including ballot irregularities, broken machines, or cases of fraudulent impersonation. Inaccurate counts or insecure ballot seals can undermine the vote tabulation process. The credibility of the results can suffer from undue delays in their announcement or by lack of transparency and audit processes in voting records. And finally, Election Management Bodies are vital to administering electoral processes and implementing the rules, and problems can commonly arise at any stage of the electoral cycle from authorities lacking capacity, resources, or impartiality.

II: Measuring Electoral Integrity

Given this conceptual framework, how do we know when elections are flawed–or even failing to meet international standards and global norms? What evidence is available? As discussed fully in the next chapter, previous studies have utilized several techniques and sources of data, each with certain strengths and weaknesses, including content analysis of observer reports, randomized controlled experiments, forensic autopsies of polling results, indices constructed for related proxy concepts, event analysis derived from news media reports, and analysis of public opinion polls.

To supplement these sources, and to generate more reliable and authoritative evidence, the Electoral Integrity Project has established a new rolling survey gathering evaluations of electoral integrity from independent elections experts. Using a comprehensive instrument, the project seeks to assess whether contemporary national parliamentary and presidential contests meet international standards throughout the electoral cycle, including during the pre-election period, the campaign, polling day, and its aftermath. The questionnaire includes forty-nine items monitoring the quality of elections. The overall PEI Index is constructed by summing the separate items for each election and each country, with the results standardized to one hundred points. Similar standardized indices are constructed for each of the eleven components of the electoral cycle. In addition, the PEI Index is ranked and categorized by thirds into contests with high, moderate, and lower levels of electoral integrity.

This book presents the first results of the Electoral Integrity Project’s expert survey of Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Index (PEI-2.8), providing evaluations for all national parliamentary or presidential elections held in independent nation states from mid-2012 to end 2014. PEI-2.8 facilitates comparison of a representative cross-section of 113 contemporary elections worldwide. The study covers ninety-seven of the globe’s nations, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, with the exclusion of microstates (with a population less than 100,000) and those countries without any national contests during this period. In cases of simultaneous legislative and executive elections, the survey monitored the latter. In countries using second ballot (run-off) electoral systems, the survey assessed the final contest. Around forty domestic and international experts were consulted for each election, generating an overall response rate of 28% from in total 1,251 election experts. Data derived from the PEI expert survey is supplemented by information from many other sources, including from the sixth wave of the World Values Survey, providing public assessments of the quality of elections at microlevel in more than forty counties. Several aggregate datasets with cross-national time-series observations monitoring the quality of elections facilitate comparison of annual trends during the third wave era of democratization, since the early 1970s. The next chapter discusses the methodology and research design of PEI in more detail, along with robustness checks to see whether the PEI results are consistent with other independent sources of related measures.

To give an initial sense of what the book is trying to explain, Figure 1.2 provides a snapshot of the estimates derived from the overall PEI hundred-point index. The results are compared with a standardized measure of democratization derived from the combined Freedom House and Polity IV estimates. Any measures can be questioned, as discussed fully in the next chapter, but if this initial cut of the data is treated for the moment as broadly correct, the key question that arises is: what best explains why some contemporary elections are seen by experts as far less successful than others in meeting global norms and inter- national standards? The answers are not immediately obvious; for example, as shown in Figure 1.2, certain states, such as Mongolia, Georgia, and Lithuania are ranked substantially higher today, according to the PEI Index, than some other countries sharing a communist legacy, such as Armenia and Ukraine. Why? Similarly in sub-Saharan Africa, the election in Ghana is rated more positively according to the PEI experts than the contest in Angola, for reasons that are not immediately obvious. In Asia, why does Bhutan out-perform Pakistan and Cambodia? And among long-established democracies, why do expert evaluations place the quality of contests in Norway, Germany, and Iceland ahead of those in Italy, Japan, and the United States?

III: Theories Explaining Flawed and Failed Elections

Given that broader processes of democratization are closely linked with the spread of multiparty elections, intellectual frameworks derived from democratic theory can be ransacked as the steel girders and concrete foundations to construct plausible explanations and empirically testable propositions as to why elections may be flawed or failed. The fall of the Berlin Wall triggered exaggerated Western hopes for the triumph of democracy worldwide. The waves of democratization following the implosion of the USSR, the color revolutions, and then the Arab uprisings, appeared to many contemporary commentators to be an unstoppable tsunami capable of toppling autocratic regimes in diverse parts of the globe. These hopes subsequently faltered, and a more realistic perspective developed following the failure of several fledgling regime transitions, exemplified by military coups in Thailand and Egypt, instability in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq, bloody civil war in Syria, state repression in Bahrain, a reassertion of autocracy, and nationalism in Putin’s Russia, destabilizing Ukraine, and the forces of the Islamic State generating new turmoil in Iraq, Syria, and bordering states. The stubborn persistence of autocracy in several parts of the world, notably in China and throughout large swathes of Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, defied early over-optimistic predictions. Today the contemporary political globe displays a checker-cloth of democratic, autocratic, and hybrid regimes scattered across Africa, South East Asia, and post-Communist Europe, exemplified by the sharp contrasts observed between the neighboring states of Poland and Belarus, Benin and Togo, or North and South Korea.

The extensive body of research literature offers three alternative perspectives, which can throw light on processes of democratization and thus also, by implication, the phenomena of electoral integrity. This includes sociological theories (discussed in Chapter 3), emphasizing the importance of processes of modernization that can provide a more hostile or favorable terrain for organizing competitive elections in each society. Chapter 4 turns to accounts rooted in international relations that underscore the role of external multilateral organizations and donor agencies seeking to strengthen processes of democratization. Both of these are treated in this book largely as conditions that either con- strain or provide important opportunities for domestic reformers seeking to strengthen electoral institutions. Chapter 5 focuses upon power-sharing theories, emphasizing the role of institutional design. Power-sharing arrangements are often thought to provide two decisive advantages, both negative and positive. Firstly, the classical liberal argument emphasizes the importance of executive constraints, suggesting that maximizing the number of veto players through institutional designs provides checks and balances on the power of any single actor, curbing the potential danger of governing parties and incumbents putting their thumb on the scales by manipulating the rules of the electoral game permanently in their favor. Secondly, the consociational argument emphasizes the need to build a reservoir of political trust and tolerance, suggesting that maximizing the number of parties and candidates gaining elected office broadens the number of stakeholders and thus engenders confidence in the rules of the game among elites and their supporters. Nevertheless, while preventing abuse, checks and balances also limit the capacity of governance agencies to get things done. Chapter 6 therefore deepens the institutional perspective by examining how far the performance of electoral authorities is shaped by their organizational structure, governance capacities, and bureaucratic ethos. Each rival perspective, supported by a wealth of research literature, generates a series of plausible propositions worth investigating through empirical analysis to establish the exact role of these determinants on the quality of elections, with certain important implications for public policy.

Rather than treating these alternative approaches as rival theories, in straw-men artificial debates, they are understood in this study more realistically as nested components operating within a comprehensive framework, as illustrated schematically in Figure 1.3. In the book’s core theoretical framework, both structural conditions and international drivers are seen to exert a direct role on the broader conditions that are favorable or unfavorable to electoral integrity, serving as constraints on the effectiveness of constitutional arrangements and administrative agencies at the heart of electoral governance. Chapters seek to unpack these arguments in more detail, drawing upon what is known from the previous research literature comparing patterns of democratization and electoral integrity, before providing fresh empirical evidence analyzing these issues. The book seeks to determine the relative importance of structural conditions, international forces, and institutional designs on electoral integrity using both systematic cross-national evidence analyzed through rigorous and well-specified models, as well as selected national case studies illustrating changes over time within specific countries.

IV: Plan of the Book

To unpack the evidence in more detail, Chapter 2 starts by discussing the cross-national indicators from the PEI Index and its eleven subcomponents. These provide broad insights into the general patterns observed among con- temporary elections in many parts of the world. The overall scorecard for electoral integrity through the PEI Index provides summary. The evidence can also be examined by scrutinizing any of the forty-nine disaggregated indices, which allow detailed comparison of specific issues within each component of the electoral cycle, such as pinpointing particular problems of district gerrymandering, weak campaign finance regulations, or inaccuracies in the voter register.

The PEI dataset provides more detailed and comprehensive evidence to com- pare all dimensions and components in the quality of contemporary elections than previous attempts to measure this phenomenon. Unfortunately, at the same time, data about the overall quality of elections observed at a single point of time, no matter how thorough and accurate, remain limited when it comes to identifying and determining causality. The problem can be illustrated by considering which societal conditions should properly be regarded as “fixed” conditions where complex interactive processes muddy the water. Therefore, the PEI dataset is supplemented in this book by drawing upon several selected national case studies that provide thicker and richer descriptions tracing the impact of structural conditions, international determinants, and power-sharing institutions on electoral integrity.

Modernization Theories: Structural and Cultural Constraints

Chapter 3 starts to analyze the evidence by drawing upon modernization theories which form the oldest tradition in the literature seeking to understand regime transitions from autocracy and the consolidation of democracy. This approach is rooted in theories of developmental political sociology and comparative politics that emerged in the mid-twentieth century, exemplified by the long tradition established by Seymour Martin Lipset. Over the last six decades, an extensive literature has linked societal modernization with processes of democratization; simultaneous patterns of development, economic growth, industrialization, urbanization, the spread of communications, and wider access to education, are theorized from this perspective as the standard “usual suspects” to either drive democratization and cultural change, or else to sustain democratic regimes once societies reach a certain tipping-point of socioeconomic development. The long tradition of research has also expanded well beyond comparing simple and crude levels of a country’s per capita GDP to embrace many other related structural and cultural macro-level factors loosely linked with the “modernization” paradigm, including the role of class and income inequality, the historical imprint of religious values, the “curse” of natural resources, the physical size and geography of states, the role of cultural values, and divisions across diverse ethnic communities.

Structural constraints are treated in the mainstream tradition of political sociology and development studies as largely immutable social forces within each state and as path-dependent constraints for actors operating within the space of an election; thus many societies inherit colonial legacies, religious cultures, and national boundaries from historical events occurring many decades or even many centuries earlier. Similarly, the spatial relationships of each country’s geography are treated as fixed antecedents, including national borders shared with neighboring states, mountainous terrains, or island shores. The physical distribution of natural resources such as oil, gas, gold, diamonds, and natural minerals, are not treated as amenable to short-term intervention. The accumulated experience of living for decades under either autocracy or democracy, and the deep-rooted cultural values acquired from this experience, are also not possible to change by actors within the period of an election campaign. For all these reasons, fixed inhospitable conditions — exemplified by deep-rooted poverty and inequality, a legacy of inter-communal violence in deeply divided multicultural societies, or the curse of natural resources — can be expected to hamper well-meaning efforts by reformers to strengthen transitions from autocracy and the consolidation of democratic regimes. Thinking along similar lines, given the close links between democracy and elections, the logic of the classic “Lipset hypothesis” suggests that many observed problems of electoral integrity are probably best explained by the challenging socioeconomic and cultural conditions under which many contemporary contests have been attempted in recent years, such as in Afghanistan or the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Moreover, from a policy perspective, while constraining the effectiveness of positive interventions, path-dependent structural and cultural constraints in the most intractable cases are thought to remain largely outside the realm of short-term social engineering by either domestic or international actors. After all, social structures and values, which cultural accounts suggest provide the bedrock support for democratic institutions, evolved over decades or even centuries in Western Europe. From a policy perspective, explanations based on structural conditions carry conservative implications of social determinism, suggesting that stakeholders need to be highly strategic and realistic in their specific choice of interventions, as there is little which can be done in the short term to improve electoral standards in a contest held under inhospitable conditions, such as to counter pervasive corruption in Afghanistan, the abuse of human rights following the military coup in Sisi’s Egypt, or violence and instability in Libya. Therefore, it would be foolhardy to expect that war-torn countries and fragile states could transform societies and governance within the space of a few years in the run up to an election. To consider modernization theories in more detail, Chapter 3 examines the comparative and historical evidence and considers the most plausible interpretation of the results.

International Engagement

Chapter 4 turns to understanding the international community’s attempts to uphold global norms and universal electoral standards. This provides an alternative argument seeking to explain why some elections succeed while others fail, and a perspective that has becoming increasingly popular in the research literature during the last decade. The most common strategies used by prodemocracy multilateral organizations and bilateral donors involve opening barriers to the diffusion of global norms through the free flow of information across national borders, targeting the provision of technical assistance and development aid invested in electoral processes and building the capacity of electoral management bodies, and supporting domestic and international teams of observers to monitor elections, combined with diplomatic pressures threatening or punishing regimes that violate standards. These standard repertoires of “soft power” are designed to improve the quality of multiparty elections and thereby strengthen transitions from autocracy and consolidate processes of democratization in developing countries. Globalization through cosmopolitan communications, opening trade barriers and membership of regional organizations, can be understood as the most general long-term process, while the provision of development aid and assistance functions as a medium-term strategy over successive contests, and electoral observing is the most specific short-term activity in a particular contest. A wide range of multilateral organizations are engaged in strengthening democratic governance and elections through these strategies including the UNDP, the International Federation of Electoral Systems (IFES), OSCE, the European Union, the Commonwealth, the OAS, International IDEA, and the Carter Center, as well as bilateral donors such as USAID, DFID, and CIDA.

Evaluation of selected cases suggests that development assistance can strengthen the quality of elections, not least through providing resources, transferring knowledge, and building technical capacity among electoral bodies. At the same time there are several reasons why the overall impact of international engagement may prove limited. Heated debate continues over the general question of whether aid “works” by strengthening regime transitions and processes of democratization. The most thorough research has explored whether the deployment of monitoring missions by regional organizations committed to global norms discourages ballot box fraud and count tampering in the observed polling place. Work suggests that this intervention generally has a modest impact on local polling places but this does not necessarily carry over to generating greater honesty elsewhere around the country; instead, dis- placement (whack-a-mole) effects have been spotted. Moreover, monitoring organizations have proliferated in recent years, with some missions committed to upholding international standards while others prove indifferent to these values. As a result, governments can now pick and choose whom to invite to observe their contests, with authoritarian regimes likely to select monitoring organizations sharing their cultural ties and values. The result has been to diminish the authority and impact of critical reports published by regional organizations such as the OSCE, OAS, and EU.

Even where international monitors report problems, however, this does not mean that states necessarily have the willpower, resources, or capacity to address them. At least in the past, efforts by the international community often focused most attention and aid upon the high drama of transitional elections, providing a short-term fix, such as spending on equipment, vehicles, temporary personnel, and consultants during the 2004 Afghanistan elections. The international community has not always had the commitment to invest in sustainable capacity building for election management bodies over successive contests and even decades.

Less is known about the impact of technical assistance and development aid invested in programs designed to strengthen electoral processes. Due to competing foreign policy considerations, however, realists suggest that donor countries are likely to use electoral aid to further their foreign policy interests, such as trade and security, rather than pressuring governments to adopt democratic reforms and strengthen human rights and electoral integrity. One of the clearest examples concerns the Obama administration’s vacillating position toward Egypt following the military coup ousting an unpopular but freely elected President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. By continuing to give billions of dollars of military aid to Egypt, despite major human rights abuses by the Sisi regime, US foreign policy conveys an ambivalent signal, which may overwhelm any positive attempts to strengthen democratic governance through providing development assistance to countries such as Tunisia. Moreover, violating the “first do no harm” principle, studies have found that overall levels of development aid spending may have unintended consequences, by serving to prop up electoral support for entrenched incumbents, especially where governments divert funds to benefit their political supporters or punish those favoring the opposition.

The international argument, therefore suggests that multilateral organizations and the donor community commonly use several types of “carrots and sticks,” with some degree of modest success in strengthening electoral integrity, although the impact of observer activities and technical assistance remains highly constrained. Most previous research has focused upon determining the short-term effects of international electoral observers, such as whether the deployment of observers across different polling areas limits ballot box fraud within a country. Far less is known with any certainty about the more complex medium-term or long-term impact of technical assistance and aid spending on institutional capacity-building initiatives over successive contests, such as the effectiveness of training workshops for electoral authorities or journalists covering the campaign. To consider the arguments in more depth, Chapter 4 examines the theoretical claims and analyzes new cross-national evidence to assess the impact of international forces on electoral integrity. The chapter focuses upon analyzing the effects of cosmopolitan communication flowing across national borders, technical assistance and development aid, and observer missions, understood to range from the most diffuse to the most specific types of international factors.

Power-Sharing Constitutional Checks and Balances

A growing body of research has examined the effects of structural conditions and international electoral observers on alternative indicators of the quality of elections. What has received far less systematic attention, however, concerns the institutions of electoral governance, including the overarching constitutional framework in any regime, and the more specific regulatory agencies that establish electoral governance in each state. On this basis, Chapter 5 seeks to understand the role of constitutional checks and balances in curbing the abuse of power and manipulation of the electoral rules and processes by any single actor, especially the governing party. The concept of “electoral governance” has been usefully defined by Hartlyn et al. as: “…the interaction of constitutional, legal, and institutional rules and organizational practices that determine the basic rules for election procedures and electoral competition; organize campaigns, voter registration, and election-day tallies; and resolve disputes and certify results.” The notion therefore refers to two nested levels and it is valuable to maintain this analytical distinction. The higher-level constitutional arrangements in any state, which provide the broadest context for electoral integrity, are exemplified by the type of regime, the electoral and party systems, the role and powers of the legislature and executive, and the independence of the courts and judiciary. But electoral governance is also shaped by the role of the core administrative agencies exercising authority directly over the implementation of electoral laws and procedures, commonly known today as electoral management bodies (EMB), as well as a wide range of administrative agencies responsible for regulating specific dimensions, such as boundary delimitation, political finance, and campaign communications, all of which are embedded within the broader constitutional arrangements. One of the key questions arising from this distinction is whether EMBs can be designed to be effective in strengthening the quality of elections, even in autocracies that have unfavorable constitutional conditions.

What institutional framework in any state is most likely to strengthen electoral integrity? One of the most important concerns electoral systems including, among other features, rules determining the electoral formulas, district magnitudes, constituency boundaries, and assembly size. These rules structure electoral competition over votes and seats. Competitive laws serve to provide procedural agreement about the rules of the game while also securing uncertainty about the electoral outcome. Strong and effective parliaments can be important as oversight agencies. In addition, the rule of law and the powers of the judiciary can also play a critical role in the electoral process, especially through deterring illegal acts, adjudicating complaints impartially, and resolving electoral disputes in a timely fashion. Civil society actors linking citizens and the state, notably the independent news media and watchdog organizations of domestic observers, can strengthen accountability and transparency among electoral authorities.

To understand the role of constitutional arrangements, drawing again upon the broader literature on democratization, insights can be derived from classical liberal theories that suggest that the more veto players are involved in electoral governance, the more safeguards exist against the potential abuse of power by any single actor, especially incumbents. Through curbing Leviathan, it is thought that the electoral process becomes more trustworthy for losers as well as winners. This argument is supplemented by theories of “power-sharing” or “consensus” democracies. This general perspective has a long and distinguished intellectual pedigree, developed theoretically most fully in the ideas of Arend Lijphart. Providing all parties with a stake in the process of electoral governance is thought to encourage buy-in from party elites, encouraging trust among rival communities. Building upon this foundation, Chapter 5 seeks to test the effects of several types of power-sharing constitutional designs on electoral integrity, including the propositions that electoral integrity is usually stronger in states with proportional representation electoral systems, an independent judiciary, effective legislatures, and freedom of the independent media. The chapter tests whether any institutional effects remain in properly specified models even after controlling for the external role of the international community (encouraging greater transparency and providing assistance designed to reform electoral malpractices), and the role of fixed and enduring social conditions such as levels of economic development (which serve as constraints on institutional effectiveness).

The Role of the Electoral Authorities

Finally the quality of a range of regulatory and administrative agencies responsible for implementing electoral laws and procedures is also expected to prove highly significant. Chapter 6 turns to compare the structure, functions, and culture of the administrative agencies involved in electoral governance. Election Management Bodies (EMBs) are the central electoral authorities responsible for administering legal regulations and electoral procedures within the broader constitutional context. Electoral governance involves a complex set of constitutional provisions, legal statutes, and administrative procedures established to regulate many specific dimensions of competition throughout the electoral cycle, including the demarcation of constituency boundaries; the rules governing political finance and party funding; the legal status, funding, and registration of candidates and political parties; the regulation of the news media, political advertising, and campaign broadcasts; the provision of gender quotas and special arrangements for minority representation; and the process of dealing with election complaints and dispute adjudication.

In terms of the formal or de jure structural organization, two types of electoral governance can be distinguished, although in practice many countries have mixed arrangements rather than falling neatly into either category.

On the one hand, governmental types of arrangements exist where the senior officers heading the electoral authorities are typically permanent civil servants working in an elections unit within an official department of state, such as the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Justice, or Home Office, reporting directly to a minister and cabinet, and indirectly accountable to parliament. Regulations are commonly implemented by staff working in local and regional agencies, including employees in state and local governments, with lower level agencies accountable to the central authorities. In terms of mandates, under this model the government department is usually responsible for many core tasks involved in regulating elections at national level, such as maintaining the electoral register, establishing guidelines for voting procedures, and standardizing local arrangements. Governmental departments may also fulfill multiple functions beyond the minimal role, including regulating candidate and party ballot access, monitoring political finance, determining boundary delimitation, allocating party political broadcasting, and dealing with dispute resolution. Alternatively, separate dedicated administrative and regulatory official bodies may be responsible for these matters, such as Boundary Commissions and Broadcasting Authorities.

As an ideal type, by contrast, the national electoral management body may be established legally as an autonomous administrative agency, although beyond the label, exactly what “autonomy” means in practice, and how de facto independence is determined, varies widely among countries. Independent administrative agencies typically have considerable control over the appointment of their own staff and control over their own budget, with security of tenure and lengthy fixed term appointments for senior commissioners so they do not need to fear dismissal by the party in government. Agencies may report directly to parliament rather than the executive. In composition, the chief commissioners are not permanent civil servants but they may instead be drawn from the judiciary, representatives nominated by political parties, or outside experts. To supplement the role of the national electoral agency, several electoral functions and roles may be dispersed among a variety of specialized administrative agencies so that broadcasting and telecommunication authorities are allocated primary responsibility for implementing a wide range of communication policies to serve the public interest, which may include regulating political advertising, party and candidate political broadcasts, campaign debates, the publication of opinion polls, and the partisan balance of campaign news coverage. Party funding and political finance may also be regulated by the national electoral management body, or this function may also fall under the remit of a specialized agency established for this purpose, such as the Federal Election Commission in the United States. Similarly the functions of dispute adjudication and legal electoral challenges may be delegated to civil and constitutional courts, not least to deal independently and justly with complaints directed against the electoral authorities. Under decentralized arrangements, which are particularly common in federal countries, state and local agencies have considerable regulatory authority and administrative discretion to organize elections.

Given these distinctions, the core questions addressed by this study are whether the agency model of electoral governance is indeed associated with greater electoral integrity than the governmental model, as commonly assumed in the technical guidance issued by the international community, and also how far the actual performance of electoral authorities is influenced more by functional capacities and administrative cultures than by formal legal organizational structures. The answers have not yet been clearly established, in part because of the dearth of reliable evidence classifying the degree of de facto EMB independence. Indeed, some comparative research contradicts the claim that the autonomy of EMBs matters; Birch found that formal EMB independence (as classified by International IDEA) had no significant impact upon the degree of electoral malpractice.

Further research is required because, despite a recent resurgence of interest, the study of electoral governance has largely been neglected, like an unfortunate uncle at a Christmas party. The most comprehensive research has examined the organizational structure of EMBs in reports produced by international agencies, notably by IFES, International IDEA, and regional organizations. The UNDP has also evaluated several cases using programmatic interventions and technical assistance designed to strengthen the capacity of EMBs. The influence of electoral management bodies on violence has also been examined, with African case studies suggesting that more inclusive EMBs are important for reducing electoral conflict. Researchers have also sought to understand the impact of the type of EMBs on public attitudes toward the electoral process. Studies have also examined the proposition that the structural independence of EMBs has a consistently positive effect on processes of democratization, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Building upon the logic already developed, this chapter classifies types of electoral governance from data in the ACE project on http://aceproject.org/, the Electoral Knowledge Network, and then examines evidence to understand whether the structural organization, functional effectiveness, and predominant public administrative culture have strengthened electoral integrity (measured by PEI). Models control for the broader context of power-sharing constitutional arrangements, and whether any institutional effects remain even after controlling for the external role of the international community and the role of fixed and enduring social conditions.

Finally, the conclusion in Chapter 7 recapitulates the overall theoretical framework, summarizes the main findings, and considers their implications for theories of electoral integrity as well as for the policy-making community. Concern about electoral integrity is hardly novel, indeed it raises centuries-old problems. Nevertheless, the electoral revolution has renewed interest in the topic during the last decade. The rapidly growing literature remains somewhat scattered across many subfields, however, and often focused relatively narrowly upon ballot box fraud occurring in polling stations in electoral autocracies, and the role of international observer missions seeking to stamp out these practices, rather than on understanding these cases as part of a far wider range of problems, which happen throughout the electoral cycle in many types of regimes. This study seeks to present a richer and more comprehensive theory, demonstrated through systematic evidence and selected case studies.

Therefore, several main schools of thought have long dominated the literature seeking to explain electoral failures. This study seeks to deconstruct these arguments, and then reassemble them to generate a more comprehensive theory capable of accounting for the complex phenomenon of electoral integrity and malpractice. The book’s conclusions summarize the overall lessons for understanding electoral integrity, as well as the insights useful for stakeholders and practitioners seeking to strengthen the quality of elections around the world. This volume therefore aims to lay the foundation for the final book in the trilogy, which addresses and evaluates policy interventions and “what can be done” most effectively to strengthen electoral integrity around the globe.

Copyright © 2015 Pippa Norris. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press.

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