Why Do Elections Fail? Explaining Election Integrity in Third and Fourth Wave Regimes

Abstract

Why do Elections Fail? In the wake of the “third” wave of democratization and the regime transitions following the end of the Cold War, elections spread to Latin America, Eastern Europe, Former Soviet Republics, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. With the recent Arab spring, over 90% of the world’s states now select their national leaders through multi-party elections. However, the integrity of these elections varies widely: ranging from ‘free and fair’ elections with genuine competition between parties and candidates, to ‘façade’ elections marred by manipulation and fraud. As elections in such different countries as Russia, Malaysia and Kenya demonstrate, the toolbox of electoral fraud is vast, including voter and candidate intimidation, manipulation of voter registration, media bias, ballot box stuffing, election violence, and many more. Given the importance of elections for democracy, and the rising number of electoral autocracies, research on election integrity is increasingly pivotal. Why do some countries manage to “get their elections right” while others fail? What explains dynamics of election integrity over time?

This paper develops an explanatory framework to understand variation in electoral integrity that builds on how social structural, institutional and political factors shape the “motives and means” of political actors to engage in electoral fraud or otherwise undermine the integrity of the electoral process. The impact of these explanatory factors on electoral integrity is empirically tested using both existing and newly collected data on electoral integrity for over 600 elections from 1974 to 2009 in 97 third and fourth wave regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, Former Soviet Republics, Sub‐Saharan Africa, South America and Central America (Van Ham 2012). The paper (a) evaluates the relative importance of structural versus actor-centered explanations of election integrity and (b) elaborates on the role of time and path dependency in explaining election integrity. The paper concludes with caveats and suggestions for further research.