This article reviews research on electoral fraud-clandestine and illegal efforts to shape election results. Only a handful of works classify reports on electoral fraud to identify its nature, magnitude, and causes. This review therefore looks at the larger number of historical works (as well as some ethnographies and surveys) that discuss ballot rigging. Its conclusions are threefold. First, fraud takes on a panoply of forms; it ranges from procedural violations of electoral law (that may or may not intend to distort results) to the outright use of violence against voters. Second, even when ballot rigging is an integral part of electoral competition, it is infrequently decisive. Fraud, nevertheless, undermines political stability because, in close races, it can be crucial. Third, political competition shapes the rhythm and nature of electoral fraud. Efforts to steal elections increase with inequality, but competitiveness-which institutions help to shape-determines the ballot-rigging strategies parties adopt.

Abstract:Summary. -The success of efforts to decentralize governance responsibilities hinges upon the incentives of local politicians. We test this argument by studying the experiences of forestry sector decentralization in Bolivia and Guatemala. We analyze the survey responses of 200 mayors and show that local-level institutional incentives are systematically linked to variations in local politicians' interest and investment decisions in the forestry sector. Further, we find that a decentralization policy that transfers very limited decision-making powers to local governments stifles local interest in organizing resource governance activities.

This article identifies the conditions leading to successful decentralized environmental management in the developing world. It focuses on Guatemala, a country where lawmakers have devolved forest protection to 331 municipalities. This study is based on an original survey of 100 randomly chosen mayors who held office between 1996 and 2000 and a database constructed from several national censuses that include geographic, demographic, socioeconomic, and biophysical variables. It suggests that local community pressure and central government support encourage mayors to value forest protection. Survey results also indicate that mayors allocate staff to forest protection when the central government makes this a priority. Mayors also dedicate personnel to this sector when they have more education and when their municipalities boast larger amounts of forested area.

This article outlines the logic and consequences of the classical theory of electoral governance. By empowering the executive with the administration of elections and the legislature with the certification of the vote tally, the theory expected elected officials to generate widely acceptable election results. This article argues that the classical theory breaks down when the same party controls the executive and the legislature. Developments in several presidential systems offer tentative support for its central hypothesis. Only when parties delegated election governance to an autonomous court system did election conflicts stop promoting political instability. Comparisons between US and Latin American separation of power systems also suggest that political developments in North and South America are much more similar than commonly assumed.

Objectives. Property rights are central to debates about natural resource policy. Governments traditionally have been seen as the appropriate custodians of natural resources for their citizens. More recently, many argue the privatization of property rights will ensure that users have incentives to manage their resources well. Common property, to the extent it is discussed at all, is seen as leading to the tragedy of the commons. We evaluate these claims by assessing property rights and forest conditions in two private and three communal forests in Guatemala. Methods. Data on biological and social phenomena from five forests (151 plots) and their associated communities were collected using the International Forestry Resources and Institutions Research Program protocols. Ordinary least squares regression was used to analyze four models. We examined t-scores for differences in coefficients for the different models. Results. The models demonstrate that de jure property rights are not a powerful predictor of variations among the sampled forests. Conclusions. We argue that de facto institutions and their enforcement are much more important than de jure property rights to forest management. Communities holding a forest in common can, under certain circumstances, create institutions to manage their resources as successfully as-or more successfully than-private owners.

Abstract:This paper uses several ols models to evaluate the impact of sociological, institutional, and spatial approaches to turnout across the 330 municipalities of Guatemala. It shows that economic development and geographic location (urban vs. rural) have little discernible impact on turnout. Turnout, however, varies positively with the share of registered voters who are female, even if fewer women are registered to vote and, as a result, actually cast ballots. As turnout has fallen through time, the share of registered voters who are literate and the share of the population that is indigenous have become negatively associated with turnout. Larger number of citizens turn out to vote as municipal size decreases and as the ratio of registered voters to voting stations falls. That these factors are significant suggests that, even in a research design that privileges socioeconomic variation, spatial-institutional differences help explain voter turnout rates. Keywords: Voter turnout; Political participation; Democratization; Guatemala Artice: IntroductionIn the study of voter turnout rates, we know two sets of facts. One is sociological: numerous survey researchers show that, at the individual level, turnout varies positively with wealth and education (see Lijphart, 1997, for a review). The other is institutional: the more competitive and accountable the political systems are, the larger the turnout rate is (Cox, 1999;Jackman, 1987;Jackman and Miller, 1995). These are findings largely drawn from national-level studies of industrial democracies. How both sets of factors interact in the developing world, however, is largely unknown.We use a subnational research design to uncover the social and institutional underpinnings of voter turnout in Guatemala. By analyzing turnout at the municipal level, we can vary the social conditions that are held constant in most cross-national research on voter turnout rates while nevertheless employing the institutional variation necessary to evaluate the consequences of electoral laws. We also pioneer the use of three new spatial-institutional variables that measure the effects of location, distance, and jurisdiction on turnout rates-factors that geographers claim are as important as any other on a whole host of political and social outcomes (Agnew, 1996;Dorling et al., 1996;Hodge and Staeheli, 1992). In this paper, we also present novel estimates of the size of the electorate-all adults 18 or older-at the municipal level with easily replicable demographic techniques.

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Legal petitions to nullify electoral results comprise a rich source for studying electoral fraud. During a fifty-year period in Costa Rica, parties submitted 120 petitions to Congress, containing more than 1,200 charges of fraud. The petitions reveal that between 1901 and 1938, more than half of such accusations took place in the country's peripheral provinces, where roughly 20 percent of voters lived. They also show that institutional changes helped to shape the nature, frequency, and magnitude of fraud. By the 1940s, the polarization of political competition was accompanied by a geographical redistribution of fraud to the central provinces of the republic, where most of the electorate resided.