Election Watchdogs

Machine generated contents note: -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Preface -- About the Contributors -- Part I: Introduction -- 1. Transparency in electoral governance -- Pippa Norris -- Part II: Upwards accountability to the international community -- 2. International monitors -- Craig Arceneaux and Anika Leithner -- 3. International enforcement -- Daniela Donno -- 4. Electoral reform -- Ferran Martinez i Coma -- 5. Election audits -- Erica Shein and Chad Vickery -- Part III: Horizontal accountability to state actors -- 6. Election management -- Holly Ann Garnett -- 7. Constitutional courts -- Armen Mazmanyan -- 8. Poll workers -- Alistair Clark and Toby S. James -- Part IV: Downward accountability to civil society -- 9. Domestic monitors -- Max Grömping -- 10. The fourth estate -- Alessandro Nai -- Part V: Conclusions -- 11. Electoral transparency, accountability and integrity -- Pippa Norris -- Notes -- References -- Index

Recent years have seen growing concern about vote fraud, election-rigging, and maladministration. When problems come to light, however, is anyone held to account and are effective remedies implemented? This volume collects essays from international experts who compare alternative approaches and apply these methods to evaluate the quality of elections in several areas, including the United States, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.

Recent decades have seen growing concern regarding problems of electoral integrity. The most overt malpractices used by rulers include imprisoning dissidents, harassing adversaries, coercing voters, vote-rigging counts, and even blatant disregard for the popular vote. Elsewhere minor irregularities are common, exemplified by inaccurate voter registers, maladministration of polling facilities, lack of security in absentee ballots, pro-government media bias, ballot miscounts, and gerrymandering. Serious violations of human rights that undermine electoral credibility are widely condemned by domestic observers and the international community. Recent protests about integrity have mobilized in countries as diverse as Russia, Mexico, and Egypt. However, long-standing democracies are far from immune to these ills; past problems include the notorious hanging chads in Florida in 2000 and more recent accusations of voter fraud and voter suppression during the Obama-Romney contest. When problems come to light, however, is anyone held to account and are effective remedies implemented? In response to these developments, there have been growing attempts to analyze flaws in electoral integrity and transparency using systematic data from cross-national time-series, forensic analysis, field experiments, case studies, and new instruments monitoring mass and elite perceptions of malpractices. This volume collects essays from international experts who evaluate the robustness, conceptual validity, and reliability of the growing body of evidence. The essays compare alternative approaches and apply these methods to evaluate the quality of elections in several areas, including the United States, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Election Watchdogs:Transparency, Accountability and Integrity presents new insights into the importance of diverse actors who promote electoral transparency, accountability, and ultimately the integrity of electoral governance.

Governments need rules, institutions, and processes to translate the will of the people into functioning democracies. Election laws are the rules that make that happen. Yet across the world various countries have crafted different rules regarding how elections are conducted, who gets to vote, who is allowed to run for office, what role political parties have, and what place money has in the financing of campaigns and candidates. The Routledge Handbook of Election Law is the first major cross-national comparative reference book surveying the electoral practices and law of the major and emerging democracies across the world. It brings together the leading international scholars on election law and democracy, examining specific issues, topics, or the regions of the world when it comes to rules, institutions, and processes regarding how they run their elections. The result is a rich volume of research furthering the legal and political science knowledge about democracies and the challenges they face. Scholars interested in election law and democracy, as well as election officials, will find the Routledge Handbook of Election Law an essential reference book.

This book provides a unique framework to explain the causes and consequences of electoral problems in Turkey. Although highly illuminating, the existing studies fall short of explaining the particularities of numerous singular electoral settings. This gap is especially valid for the grey-zone regimes, which are neither clearly democratic nor conventionally authoritarian in Turkey. Establishing a historical outlook by scrutinising the elections which have taken place since the 1950s, Emre Toros identifies the challenges related to electoral integrity nested at individual and institutional levels. In this way, this book contributes to electoral integrity literature by utilising the valuable research strategies of the existing studies, proposing alternative data sources that will better understand the phenomena and, most importantly, employing a methodology that will suit both singular and comparative cases.

This work continues the series of election data handbooks published by OUP. It presents a compendium of electoral data for all the 62 states in Asia, Australia and Oceania from their independence to the beginning of the 21st century.

The book studies and compares causes, catalysts and consequences of democratic regression and revival in South, Southeast, and Northeast Asia. The Asia-Pacific presents social scientists with a natural laboratory to test competing theories of democratic erosion, decay, and revival and to identify new patterns and relationships. This volume combines conceptual and comparative research with single case studies. Overall, the collection of studies in this volume captures different forms of democratic regression and autocratization, examine how Asia-Pacific experiences fit into debates about democracy’s deepening global recession and what the Asia-Pacific experiences contribute to the understanding of the causes, catalysts, and consequences of democratic regression and resilience in the comparative politics literature. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Democratization.

This report presents findings from a nationwide face-to-face survey of 2,627 Malaysians between March and April 2021 regarding public perceptions on the Election Commission (EC) and on election management. Malaysians by and large hold a cautious, moderate affirmation of the state of democracy in Malaysia, and of it has made notable progress over the past decade. A quarter of respondents regard the 2018 general election to be very free or/and fair, while 43 percent think that it was free/fair though not without problems. This perception appears to have been influenced by the fact that there was a change in the federal government. Public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the election management process and the EC is weakly affirmative, as revealed by a majority expressing a lack of confidence in an eventual online voting system being handled transparently. Urban residents generally have a greater distrust of state institutions. Some notable contrasts in regional trends: -- Sarawakians have a high level of trust in state institutions. -- Sabahans have the lowest appreciation for the progress made in the state of democracy in the country, the lowest satisfaction with civil liberty, or the lowest trust in state institutions except for the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) and the EC. -- West Malaysians have the lowest level of trust in the MACC and EC but express the highest level of appreciation for the progress that has been made in the state of democracy.