Why Governments and Parties Manipulate Elections

Abstract

Why do parties and governments cheat in elections they cannot lose? This book documents the widespread use of blatant and excessive manipulation of elections and explains what drives this practice. Alberto Simpser shows that, in many instances, elections are about more than winning. Electoral manipulation is not only a tool used to gain votes, but also a means of transmitting or distorting information. This manipulation conveys an image of strength, shaping the behavior of citizens, bureaucrats, politicians, parties, unions and businesspeople to the benefit of the manipulators, increasing the scope for the manipulators to pursue their goals while in government and mitigating future challenges to their hold on power. Why Governments and Parties Manipulate Elections provides a general theory about what drives electoral manipulation and empirically documents global patterns of manipulation.

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

“…While fraud can be perpetrated under a variety of political regimes (Argersinger 1985;Leemann and Bochsler 2014), recent research suggests that it is particularly widespread in autocracies, and, specifically, that autocrats are often keen to inflate turnout figures and votes for the winning candidate (Rundlett and Svolik 2016;Simpser 2013;Sjoberg 2014). Myagkov et al (2009) andLukinova et al (2011) report suspicious turnout distributions in some of Russia's regions and smaller rayony (sub-regional districts) where turnout is suspicously high and/or turnout distribution is double peaked, that is, it appears as having two different modes or local maxima.…”

“…Second, inflated margins of victory can discourage the opposition and deter future challengers (Magaloni 2006;Simpser 2013). The literature on electoral clientelism suggests that the loyalties of a national regime's clients could be fragile if the regime appears weak (Hale 2007;Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007;Rigger 2007).…”

“…National officials therefore often expect grotesquely high-fraudulent-results to be delivered by their sub-national clients even if fraud is likely to be exposed. In fact, Simpser (2013) suggests that the ability to perpetrate blatant electoral fraud-and get away with it-may be intended deliberately as a signal to the autocrat's clients that the regime is invincible.…”

“…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.…”

Measuring Electoral Democracy with V-Dem Data: Introducing a New Polyarchy Index

“…Calingaert 2006, Lehoucq 2003, Bermeo 2010, Birch 2011, Donno 2013, Simpser 2013, Kelley 2013, Scheduler 2002, Norris 2015, van Ham and Lindberg 2015. Disregarding the "frequency" aspect, since that would build an unnecessary temporal aspect into the concept of polyarchy, this component is thus in essence tapping into whether an election could be considered free from manipulation.…”