Can International Election Monitoring Harm Governance?

Abstract

The monitoring of elections by international groups has become widespread. But can it have unintended negative consequences for governance? We argue that high-quality election monitoring, by preventing certain forms of manipulation such as stuffing ballot boxes, can unwittingly induce incumbents to resort to tactics of election manipulation that are more damaging to domestic institutions, governance, and freedoms. These tactics include rigging courts and administrative bodies and repressing the media. We use an original-panel dataset of 144 countries in 1990-2007 to test our argument. We find that, on average, high-quality election monitoring has a measurably negative effect on the rule of law, administrative performance, and media freedom. We employ various strategies to guard against endogeneity, including instrumenting for election monitoring.

Fabricating votes for Putin: new tests of fraud and electoral manipulations from Russia

“…Researchers have therefore pointed to limited specificity of last-digit tests as a forensic tool because last-digit tests target a specific type of fraud mostly consisting of the writing in of made-up numbers on precinct return sheets and may not detect cases of forced voting, multiple voting, and ballot stuffing (Enikolopov, Korovkin et al 2013). Furthermore, a new generation of fraud literature is beginning to systematically analyse not just whether a particular fraud type is perpetrated, but whether it occurs in conjunction with, or in lieu of, other types of irregularities (Beaulieu and Hyde 2009;Ichino and Schuendeln 2012;Simpser 2013;Simpser and Donno 2012;Sjoberg 2014). Research into the "menu[s] of manipulation" (Schedler 2002) conventionally distinguishes between pre-electoral manipulations and election-day fraud.…”

Elections and Democratization in Authoritarian Regimes

“…Because the stakes are higher in these contests, they are more likely to elicit higher levels of domestic mobilization for democracy. I include a dichotomous variable, main election , coded as a “1” for presidential elections in presidential (or mixed) systems and legislative elections in parliamentary systems (Simpser and Donno ). Second, I include a variable indicating whether the incumbent was running in the election, which is expected to decrease the chances of democratization (Cheeseman ; Maltz ) .…”

Aiming at the Wrong Targets: The Domestic Consequences of International Efforts to Build Institutions

“…However, another group of scholars are much less sanguine about external incentives and pressures. They warn that these can result in unproductive or pathological behaviors, such as insincere compliance, strategic manipulation or withholding of information, and the creation of "rational fictions" for external consumption (McNamara 2002;Bush 2011;Simpser and Donno 2012;Samuel 2014;Kerner, Jerven, and Beatty Forthcoming;Sandefur and Glassman 2015). We provide new evidence about one mechanism (target-setting) through which international actors set in motion incentives for governments to engage in unproductive signaling.…”

“…It particularly highlights how international monitoring can short-circuit the process of building and reforming institutions over longer periods of time. For example, studies of election monitoring describe how threatened incumbents who are prevented from stuffing ballot boxes often shift instead to repressing the media (Simpser and Donno 2012).…”