Toby S. James and Holly Ann Garnett (2025, in development) What is Electoral Integrity? Reconceptualising Election Quality in an Age of Complexity (Cambridge University Press).

Elections are indispensable for democracy.  They give citizens an opportunity to elect their representatives, hold governments to account and shape policy making.  Recent scholarship on electoral integrity has led to enormous advances in understanding the policy mechanisms for delivering better elections and consequences of good quality elections.  However, there is a longstanding debate about how to conceptualise electoral integrity.  Should they be judged based on international agreements?  Public perceptions of what constitutes a ‘fair’ elections?  Or should our conceptions of electoral integrity be connected to normative theory? 

This debate has become even more pressing in light of new forms of autocratic adaption, foreign interference from subversive actors, the challenges of delivering elections as the digital era progresses, and other threats such as global health emergencies and climate change. 

This book argues that we live in an age of complexity in which there are new risks to elections. To respond to this pressing concern, the book introduces a new conceptual framework for understanding electoral integrity by drawing from democratic theory.  This is proposed as an alternative normative framework for evaluating election quality and will be used by the authors to measure electoral integrity in the future through a revised version of the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Index.  This book will provide important lessons for prescribing best practices to defend and enrich democracy, as well as major scholarly implications for the study of democracy, democratisation, comparative politics and beyond.