Regulating networks in decline

Decker, Christopher

doi:10.1007/s11149-016-9300-z

Cited by 15 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…First, the role of postal services is pivotal. With the overall demand for delivery of letters declining, postal services and their public regulation remain under severe pressure (Decker, 2016). In the case of voting from abroad, the challenges are accentuated, and relate to the voters' sense of uncertainty of (timely) delivery, multiple timing issues, as well as the difficulty of reaching the policy goal of equality of eligible voters in different parts of the world.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unlike in the case of advance voting, the initiative to incorporate postal voting into the electoral system was not taken by political parties or electoral authorities but by two NGOs: the Finland Society and the Finnish Expatriate Parliament (FEP). The FEP called for the introduction of postal voting in each of its sessions from the year 2000 onwards (FEP Resolutions, 2015;2012;2007;2005;2002;2000). According to the resolutions, postal voting enhances non-resident Finns' political rights and social connectedness to Finland.…”

Section: Introducing Postal Voting In Finlandmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Signed, Sealed, and Delivered with Trust: Non-Resident Citizens’ Experiences of Newly Adopted Postal Voting

2021

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The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that the traditional “booth, ballot, and pen” model of voting, based on a specific location and physical presence, may not be feasible during a health crisis. This situation has highlighted the need to assess whether existing national electoral legislation includes enough instruments to ensure citizens’ safety during voting procedures, even under the conditions of a global pandemic. Such instruments, often grouped under the umbrella of voter facilitation or convenience voting, range from voting in advance and various forms of absentee voting (postal, online, and proxy voting) to assisted voting and voting at home and in hospitals and other healthcare institutions. While most democracies have implemented at least some form of voter facilitation, substantial cross-country differences still exist. In the push to develop pandemic-sustainable elections in different institutional and political contexts, variation in voter facilitation makes it possible to learn from country-specific experiences. As accessibility and inclusiveness are critical components of elections for ensuring political legitimacy and accountability these lessons are of utmost importance.In this study, we focus on Finland, where the Parliament decided in March 2021 to postpone for two months the municipal elections that were originally scheduled to be held on April 18. Although the decision was mostly justified by the sudden and dramatic daily increase in new COVID-19 infections, the inability to guarantee the opportunity to vote for those in quarantine was included among the likely risks. The failure to organize health-safe voting procedures to accommodate the original schedule emphasizes a certain paradox in the Finnish electoral legislation: caution in introducing new facilitation instruments has led to lower levels of preparedness and flexibility in crisis situations. Although a forerunner in implementing extensive advance voting opportunities, Finland has only recently introduced postal voting, which is restricted to voters living abroad. Hence, we ask: what can be learned from this form of convenience voting if expanded to all voters to enhance the sustainability of elections?Our analyses are based on a survey conducted among non-resident voters (n = 2,100) after the 2019 parliamentary elections in which postal voting from abroad was allowed for the first time. Our results show that whereas trust in the integrity of postal voting is quite high, various efforts needed from individual voters substantially increase the costs of postal voting. Postal operations also raise concerns. Furthermore, voters felt that requiring two witnesses made postal voting cumbersome, an issue that needs to be resolved, particularly if applying postal voting in the context of a pandemic. The Finnish case constitutes a concrete example of a situation in which voter facilitation targeted to a particular segment of society may become a testbed for electoral engineering that will improve voting opportunities for everyone.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introducing Postal Voting In Finlandmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered with Trust: Non-Resident Citizens’ Experiences of Newly Adopted Postal Voting

2021

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“…While the Finnish diaspora has been all but invisible in Finnish society, some of the political objectives of their interest organ have been realized along the way, including the introduction of dual citizenship in 2003 (Fagerlund and Brander, 2013, 1-2). Postal voting, in contrast, took such an extensive period to get through that, in the meanwhile, the infrastructure it relies on-the public mail services worldwide-have gone into decline (see Decker, 2016). In making sense of the process below, the underlying question is why, despite a favorable trend in facilitation of political inclusion, did it take such a long time to adopt postal voting.…”

Section: A Slowly Accepted Wish From the Expat Lobbymentioning

confidence: 99%

Practicing Ballot Secrecy: Postal Voting and the Witness Requirement at the 2019 Finnish Elections

Weide

2021

Front. Polit. Sci.

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Electoral rights belong to the core of citizenship in democratic nation-states. Voting, then, represents an actualization of the relationship between the citizen and the political community. For citizens living outside the country in which they are eligible to vote, voting signifies a rare institutional connection to the country of origin. The aim of this article is to explore the introduction of the postal vote, a new form of voting for external voters at Finnish elections, from the grassroots perspective. The study focuses on how a central policy concern, safeguarding ballot secrecy, was resolved in the policy implementation by the witness requirement, and how the individual voters subsequently applied it. According to the voters’ accounts of the act of voting, the adopted method for underlining the importance of ballot secrecy in the Finnish overseas postal voting system, for many voters, makes little sense. While they effectively practice ballot secrecy, many fail to demonstrate this to the witnesses they were supposed to convince. Conversely, for these voters, the witness requirement merely works to break the secondary secrecy of elections, namely the secrecy of their participation itself. The empirical material for the article comprises policy documents and thematic text material (interviews, written responses) from 31 Finnish citizens living outside Finland. The article contributes to the scholarly debates on voting as a social, institutional and material practice. It further provides policy-relevant knowledge about grassroots implementation to various electoral administrations many of which, at the time of writing, face pressure to reform their repertoire of voting methods to function better in exceptional circumstances, such as a pandemic.

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“…Swyngedouw ( 2009) pointed out that the widely promoted market-oriented model of WS, that should be provided on an affordable and universal basis (Decker, 2016), was social and environmentally unsustainable and that achieving the WS targets envisaged in the sustainable development goals (SDGs) would not be possible without a proper embedding of these services within a public, social, financial and regulatory system backed by massive national and international public funding.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regulatory impact assessment (RIA) : improving governance on the water and sanitation agenda

Carvalho¹

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Regulating networks in decline

Cited by 15 publications

References 35 publications

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered with Trust: Non-Resident Citizens’ Experiences of Newly Adopted Postal Voting

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered with Trust: Non-Resident Citizens’ Experiences of Newly Adopted Postal Voting

Practicing Ballot Secrecy: Postal Voting and the Witness Requirement at the 2019 Finnish Elections

Regulatory impact assessment (RIA) : improving governance on the water and sanitation agenda

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