ELECTORAL BACKSLIDING

Special Issue of Electoral Studies, coming soon

Throughout the world, scholars and international organisations have voiced their concern in recent years that democracy appears to be ‘backsliding’ (Hellmeier et al. 2021; International IDEA 2021). These forms of backsliding are often described as taking a different form – with open-ended coups d’état and state violence being replaced with promissory coups, executive aggrandizement and strategic electoral manipulation described as being more common (Bermeo 2016; Runciman 2018; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). The pandemic has been presented as an opportunity for autocratic leaders to restrict freedoms and extend states of emergency (Edgell et al. 2021). In response to these challenges, a Summit for Democracy was hosted by the United States in December, to start a year of action that would aim to ‘to strengthen our own democracies and push back on authoritarianism, fight corruption, promote and protect human rights of people everywhere’ (Biden 2021).

Elections are an indispensable part of the democratic process (Przeworski 1999; Dahl 1971). They give citizens an opportunity to elect their representatives, hold governments to account and shape policy making. It is well known that there is enormous variation in the quality and inclusiveness of elections around the world (Norris 2014, 2015; Birch 2011; James and Garnett 2020; Norris 2017). An electoral cycle approach shows that problems can vary from cases of electoral violence and voter intimidation, vote rigging, gerrymandered electoral districts, incomplete electoral registers, through to under-resourced electoral officials and poorly designed adjudication processes and more.

The traditional literature on democratization identified three waves of democratization, relating to periods of dramatic increases in the quality of democracy (Fukuyama 1989; Huntington 1993). But electoral integrity and quality of democracy, while closed related and intertwined, are not the same. There is therefore a need to examine the longitudinal trends in the quality of elections, identify the pressures which might be emerging and the policy solutions which could be developed.

After a broad introductory article mapping trends in electoral backsliding, this special issue considers the questions: Where is electoral integrity on the rise? And where have elections been backsliding? We consider these questions with diverse geographic focuses, but also with an eye to different stages of the electoral cycle that have seen new trends in the improvement or decline of electoral integrity. Some of the pressures on electoral integrity may be long-existing causal pressures such as the temptation of incumbents to try to manipulate electoral administration or dampen turnout.

But there are also new challenges as societies under major demographic, technological and environmental changes which are bringing broader changes to societies in the twenty-first century. These changes have brought with them new challenges to the information environment and opportunities for clientelism. At the same time, these innovations can also lead to new forms of voter education and awareness and observation models. How can scholars and practitioners understand these trends in electoral decline and improvement? Furthermore, what policy solutions might help thwart declines in electoral integrity?

This special issue comes ten years after the special symposium on electoral integrity which launched the research agenda and is therefore a timely point to revisit these questions, also coming after major problems in US elections with the storming of the capitol building. Elections and democracy are under threat; but are citizens, electoral administrators and political leaders fighting back?

Contents

Links to papers will appear here following publication:

Bibliography

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