Changes in the menu of manipulation: Electoral fraud, ballot stuffing, and voter pressure in the 2011 Russian election

Harvey, Colin

doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2015.11.004

Cited by 45 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…By building or co-opting local patronage networks, incumbents increase the difficulty and risk of opposition mobilization. Cole Harvey (2016) indirectly tests the argument by showing that mobilizational forms of manipulation are more common in competitive areas, while administrative fraud is more common in pro-regime strongholds. We offer a more direct (and cross-national) test, by showing that post-election protest is more likely when administrative fraud, rather than voter-mobilizing efforts, is used.…”

Section: Theory and Hypotheses: Signals From Election Manipulation Tamentioning

confidence: 99%

Methods of Election Manipulation and the Likelihood of Post-Election Protest

Harvey

Mukherjee

2018

Gov. & oppos.

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The risk of popular protest is one of the few deterrents against election manipulation in authoritarian regimes and unconsolidated democracies, but why are some fraudulent elections met with popular protest while others are not? We use data from elections in 108 countries, from 1980 to 2004, to show that the regime’s choice of election manipulation tactics affects the likelihood of post-election protest. Leaders signal their strength and resources by manipulating elections, but some manipulation tactics send stronger signals than others. We find that opposition groups are more likely to protest when relatively cheap administrative fraud is employed, but not when more costly forms of manipulation – extra-legal mobilization and voter intimidation – are used. This study demonstrates the importance of accounting for variation in electoral manipulation tactics, and the information communicated by those tactics, in explaining post-election protest and the stability of electoral authoritarian and newly democratic regimes.

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Section: Theory and Hypotheses: Signals From Election Manipulation Tamentioning

confidence: 99%

Methods of Election Manipulation and the Likelihood of Post-Election Protest

Harvey

Mukherjee

2018

Gov. & oppos.

Self Cite

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“…In our paper, we thus go beyond studies that document the existence of political machines (Gans-Morse et al 2014;Frye et al 2014;Kudelia and Kuzio 2015;Frye et al 2019a,b) or electoral fraud and manipulation during elections (Myagkov et al 2009;Enikolopov et al 2013;Simpser 2013;Harvey 2016;Skovoroda and Lankina 2017), and document an example for the systematic discrimination of entrepreneurs affiliated with the political opposition during everyday life, in an electoral authoritarian regime. Importantly, other than in studies focusing on the use of administrative resources during elections, where chains of command are often easier to detect, 1 in our research design it remains more difficult to discern the determinants for the bureaucratic behavior we observe.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Bureaucratic discrimination in electoral authoritarian regimes: Experimental evidence from Russia

Rochlitz

Mitrokhina

Nizovkina

2021

European Journal of Political Economy

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Are investors in electoral authoritarian regimes discriminated against for political activism? In this paper, we implement a simple experiment to test whether affiliation with the ruling party or the political opposition affects the probability that investors receive advice from investment promotion agencies in Russian regions. Between December 2016 and June 2017, we sent 1504 emails with a short question and a number of randomized treatments to 188 investment promotion agencies in 70 Russian regions. Although investment promotion agencies are nominally depoliticized in Russia, we find that switching the political affiliation of a potential investor from the opposition party "Yabloko" to the government party "United Russia" on average increases the chances to receive a reply by 30%. The effect strongly depends on regional levels of political competition, with higher levels of discrimination in regions that are less politically competitive.

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“…Electoral fraud is a costly operation usually involving a well-oiled machinery of party members, state employees, and election officials (Harvey, 2016;Simpser, 2013).…”

Section: How Electronic Voting Reduced Fraudmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Unintended Consequences of Democratic Reforms: Electronic Voting and Criminal Violence in Brazil

Nieto-Matiz

Skigin

2020

Preprint

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Under what conditions can democracy reduce violent conflict? We argue that, in weakly institutionalized contexts, institutional reforms that promote the rise of programmatic parties may decrease levels of violence. We exploit the implementation of a political reform in Brazil that gradually introduced electronic voting to reduce electoral fraud. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that violence decreased by a half standard deviation in municipalities where electronic voting was first adopted, relative to those where the technology was not implemented. We show that by reducing electoral fraud and increasing enfranchisement, electronic voting eroded the power of hegemonic political machines more likely to collude with organized criminal groups. These results, we show, cannot be explained by higher investments in security or social programs. This paper sheds light on the links between criminal violence and elections, the alternatives to iron-fist policies to curb crime, and the unintended consequences of democratic reforms in weakly institutionalized contexts.

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Changes in the menu of manipulation: Electoral fraud, ballot stuffing, and voter pressure in the 2011 Russian election

Cited by 45 publications

References 62 publications

Methods of Election Manipulation and the Likelihood of Post-Election Protest

Methods of Election Manipulation and the Likelihood of Post-Election Protest

Bureaucratic discrimination in electoral authoritarian regimes: Experimental evidence from Russia

The Unintended Consequences of Democratic Reforms: Electronic Voting and Criminal Violence in Brazil

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