Professor Steven Livingston (The George Washington University)

In recent years, communication scholars have turned to questions concerning various digital communication platforms and social change. Studies connecting branded social media such as Twitter and Facebook and social movement and contentious politics offer one variant of this vibrant research field. Similar inquiries have been made concerning the Arab Spring.

Steven Livingston’s talk firstly expands on these themes with an examination of a wider range of digital technologies. Secondly, he shifts the focus to transnational advocacy organizations and networks. Transnational advocacy network (TAN) theory emerged in international relations theory at the cusp of the digital era in the mid-1990s. It hopes to explain transnational advocacy for environmental issues, women’s rights, and human rights. A TAN includes “those relevant actors working internationally on an issue, who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services” (Keck & Sikkink, 1998, 154-155). Livingston’s research centers on the last aspect of Keck and Sikkink’s definition concerning information and service exchange.

To date, TANs research has not taken into account the effects of the revolution in digital information technology. In the 21st century, dense exchanges of information are quite different than what Keck and Sikkink described in the 20th century. Livingston is therefore interested in two questions: 1. How has digital monitoring technology affected TANs human rights advocacy? 2. How has digital technology affected the nature of human rights advocacy organizations and TANs?

To the first point, among other technologies, Livingston considers the use of high-resolution commercial remote sensing satellites, mobile telephony and geographical information systems (GIS), and NextGen DNA analytics used to identify the remains of genocide victims and the “disappeared.” He argues that the greater scope and reach of human rights monitoring has changed issue framing and agenda setting dynamics concerning human rights. To the second point, Livingston argues that advocacy organizations in TANs include new organizational morphologies - organizational forms that rely on and are ontologically dependent on digital platforms. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg have called such organizational types “organization by communication.” In the case of human rights advocacy, one might include Syria Tracker or Wikileaks.

Professor Jeffrey Karp (University of Exeter; visiting fellow Electoral Integrity Project)

This project examines the gap between what citizens desire from democratic politics, and their perceptions of how democracy is working in their nation. At a very basic level, democratic legitimacy requires that people perceive their elections are fair, and that they offer meaningful choices. In many nations - particularly in younger democracies - there is a substantial gap between what citizens expect from democracy and what they perceive they are getting. Scholars of electoral systems have directed substantial attention at how various institutional arrangements (Anderson and Guilory 1997; Karp et al 2003) and political responsiveness (Aarts and Thomassen 2008) may affect satisfaction with democracy.

These studies often rely on a single, narrow survey question on 'satisfaction' with democracy that does not adequately measure democratic expectations or perceptions of democratic performance. The paper uses recently released European Social Survey (ESS) opinion data from 29 countries to examine factors that structure perceptions of whether or not elections are conducted fairly, and whether political parties are seen as offering clear choices. The ESS has items that measure respondent expectations about how important fair elections and distinctive parties are to democracy in general, and also ask perceptions of how such things are in their country. I use these items to create measures of the gap between what individuals expect from democracy, and what they perceive (an expectations gap).

At the national level, the gap is lowest in places such as Norway, Switzerland, and Germany, and highest in Russia, Italy and Bulgaria. I use multi-level models to test hypotheses about country-level and individual-level factors that shape these perceptions. Country-level factors include measures of electoral system, party system and public corruption. National-level party system features such as age of democracy; the effective number of parties and (lack of) disproportionality are expected to be associated with perceptions that parties offer meaningful choices, while corruption is expected to cause people to find elections not meeting expectations for fairness.

At the individual level, partisan self-interest (supporting winning a party), media use, interest, education, and other factors are accounted for. Given the literature, winners are expected to be more likely to find democracy living up to their expectations, while the better educated are expected to be less so (Dalton 1984; Norris 2011).

Preliminary analysis indicates that nearly one-third of variance in the expectations gaps are due to country-level factors, and mixed-level models indicate that party system and electoral system measures can explain where people view democracy succeeding or falling short. For example, where there are more parties or less disproportionality, we find more people holding the opinion that parties function in ways that are important for democracy in general. While this might offer hope for advocates of electoral reforms, these country-level effects on opinions appear completely swamped by corruption.

When national corruption levels are modeled, most other county-level factors are no longer significant. The paper will discuss the implications of the overwhelming role that corruption has on opinions of democracy - this is feature that has been neglected in many studies of satisfaction with democracy (albeit see Anderson and Tverdova 2003).

Professor Simon Jackman (Australian National University, Stanford University and visiting fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney)

Campaigns, parties, interest groups, pollsters and political scientists increasingly rely on voter registration lists and consumer files to identify targets for registration, persuasion and mobilization, and as sampling frames for surveys. However, a sizeable proportion of the U.S. citizen population does not appear on these lists, making them invisible to list-based campaigns and research. What political consequences follow from a list-based view of the polity? How large is the unlisted population? Are their preferences ignorable?

We address this question after matching respondents to the face-to-face component of the 2012 American National Election Study (sampled by an address-based design) to voter and consumer files. At least 11% of the adult citizenry is unlisted. 1 in 5 Blacks and (citizen) Hispanics are unlisted, but just 8% of Whites. The unlisted earn less income and are less likely to have health insurance or own their own home than the listed population. The unlisted have markedly lower levels of political engagement than the listed and are much less likely to report contact with candidates and campaigns.

Yet, the unlisted have coherent policy preferences that tend to the left of listed respondents. Unlisted ANES respondents reported favoring Obama over Romney 73-27 and just 14% identify as Republicans. We find that if unregistered and unlisted people voted at comparable rates to registered people with the same level of interest in politics, both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections would have been won by Democrats.

Clearly, the exclusion of the unlisted has important practical and normative implications for political representation, measures of public opinion, election outcomes and public policy.

Professor John Keane (Sydney Democracy Network, University of Sydney)

Professor John Keane will challenge our 'big picture' understanding of the contemporary history of elections by probing the connected trends of the universal adoption of electoral practices, the spread of various types of ‘electoral authoritarianism’ and new electoral practices 'non-Western' contexts. When elections are examined from a long-term and global perspective, can we say with any certainty that their significance and functions have changed during our generation or will change in the future?

We live in times shaped by the conviction that periodic ‘free and fair’ elections are the heart and soul of democracy. Since 1945, when only a dozen parliamentary democracies were left on our planet, elections have come to be seen widely as the best way of forming good governments, sometimes even as a ‘timeless’ and non-negotiable feature of political life. Article 21 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in December 1948, famously set the standard: ‘The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage’. 

This is the orthodoxy. Yet all’s not well in the house of elections; public fractiousness and political dissent are brewing. There are signs of rising citizen disaffection with mainstream ‘catch-all’ parties accused of failing to be all good things to all voters. Support for populist parties is rising. Experiments with ‘anti-political’, direct-action social networks are flourishing. In some quarters, voting is judged a worthless waste of time, money and energy. And more than a few democracies are shaped by the Philippines syndrome: a strangely contradictory trend marked by elections that come wrapped in intense media coverage and great public excitement mixed with bitter disappointment about the sidelining of elected governments by big banks, big money and the outsourcing of state functions to cross-border power chains. The feeling that elections are pointless manipulations by the rich and powerful finds its nadir in the whole phenomenon of ‘electoral authoritarianism’ in Russia, China, central Asia and elsewhere: the use by oligarchs of periodic elections as an instrument for consolidating arbitrary power. 

Pressured by such developments, the passion and purpose that fuelled the historic post- 1789 struggles for ‘one person, one vote’ seem to be dying, or dead. So it comes as an odd surprise that our times are equally marked by organised refusals to let hollowed-out elections get the upper hand. There are not only signs of renewed interest in making elections ‘free and fair’; many efforts are under way to multiply their forms and invest them with new meaning. 

The trends take our world of global politics into the future, towards the unknown. Since 1945, a whole new anthropology of electoral practices has taken root in such ‘non-Western’ contexts as India, Sierra Leone, Bhutan, Taiwan and Iran. The political geography of elections is changing. Global communications enable diaspora voting. National elections are witnessed by regional and global publics. Elections are exported, by force of arms. Voting in cross-border settings is spreading; it now shapes the life of organisations such as the IOC, WTO, European Parliament, Tibetan Administration and the Antarctica Treaty System. Alternative sites of elected and un-elected representation are meanwhile multiplying; monitory democracy gains ground at the expense of old-fashioned parliamentary democracy. The contours of elections are also being reshaped by crowd sourcing, election monitoring, integrity projects and the growth of micro-parties and ‘liquid’ party procedures. In more than a few global contexts, efforts to extend votes to the dead and the unborn and to the world of living species and inanimate things are also on the political agenda. 

These various attempts to counter feelings of the worthlessness of voting (‘elections without democracy’) can be interpreted as experiments in breathing new life back into the spirit and substance of elections. They raise fundamental questions of global political importance: in spite of their declining importance in determining who gets what, when and how, do elections with integrity have a future? Do they still matter and, if so, is their rejuvenation, against formidable odds, now among the vital political imperatives of our age? Or are elections slowly losing their grip on democracy? Are they perhaps in terminal decline? Is the universal belief in the universality of ‘free and fair’ elections a mid-20th-century delusion, a worn-out dogma now urgently in need of replacement by fresh visions and new democratic innovations fit for our times?

Alessandro Nai (University of Sydney)

An established literature assesses the substantial conditions for the presence of electoral integrity (e.g., Norris 2014). Within this framework, recent research focuses on how individual perceive the integrity of elections, that is, if and how citizens perceive that elections in their country are "free and fair" and globally lacking manipulations and malpractices (e.g., Aarts and Thomassen 2008; Birch 2008, 2010).

This contribution investigates the deep individual underpinnings of those perceptions. More specifically, our aim is to uncover how values (e.g., Schwartz 1992) and the Big Five personality traits (John et al. 1991, 2008) affect how citizens perceive the conduct of elections, and their integrity, in their country.

To the best of our knowledge no existing research has yet provided empirical evidence in this sense; compensating this gap is paramount for a full understanding of electoral dynamics, given that both values and personality traits have been shown to matter greatly for attitudes, opinions and perceptions.

Empirical analyses rely on the sixth wave of the World Value Survey (2014), the only individual dataset providing information simultaneously on values, personality traits and perceptions of electoral integrity. The dataset allows us, furthermore, to compare results across 13 countries, thus controlling for differences across party and electoral systems, and foremost for varying levels of measured electoral integrity (PEI index; Norris et al. 2013, 2014): rather high (Germany, Netherlands, Rwanda, South Africa, Thailand), average (Colombia, Ecuador, India, Kuwait, Pakistan), rather low (Algeria, Iraq, Jordan).

Our contribution innovates in a twofold way: first, it provides an initial account on the "deep roots" of how individuals perceive electoral integrity following a comparative approach. Second, it stresses the interplay between values and personality traits in determining attitudes and behaviours, an issue that has received scant attention so far.

Assistant Professor Zaad Mahmood (Presidency University, India; visiting fellow Electoral Integrity Project)

Democracy in India is often considered an post colonial outlier due to the stability of democratic order and high electoral participation, and despite challenging socio-political realities -- such as large-scale illiteracy, poverty, ethnic heterogeneity and backwardness -- characteristics that lower political participation. Despite the enormous attention to Indian politics, there has been little quantitative large-scale analysis on the determinants of electoral turnout.

This paper contributes to the literature on determinants of electoral turnout in India through an original constituency level analysis. In line with the existing study of Diwakar (2008) and Kondo (2003) I find that size of electors, extent of urbanisation and margin of political competition negatively affect turnout while literacy has a positive effect on turnout. Going beyond these oft-stated variables, I also find strong evidence that share of schedule caste population, economic inequality, and nature of party competition drive electoral turnout in India.

The outcome corroborates the sociological and micro studies of elections that claim social heterogeneity especially caste and region, share of rural population and partisan competition are the key driver of political participation in India. Interestingly the effect of social heterogeneity on electoral turnout is strongly induced by the nature of party competition. Through the incorporation of new variables the paper develops on the existing literature by providing a theoretically and methodologically coherent model of electoral turnout in India.

Dr. Zulfan Tadjoeddin (University of Western Sydney)

Discussant: Dr. Justin Hastings (University of Sydney)
Chair: Dr. Ferran Martinez i Coma (University of Sydney)

The adoption of direct local elections of local chiefs in more than 500 sub-national entities in Indonesia since 2005 has opened a truly free market competition for those elected posts. Thousands of candidates across the country compete for local office. Political contenders calculate their chances and make investment decisions. Political parties auction their nomination tickets. Political marketers and strategists provide their services. Voters are ready to sell their votes. At the end, local budgets and business licences are the main prizes to win. It is hypothesized that the nature of the competition to win the elected posts is more on personally-centred effort of a particular aspiring candidate rather than collective endeavour at a party level. The supposedly public goods nature of the elected posts is reduced to private goods, or, at best, club goods in a very limited sense. Then, the elected posts would mainly benefit the club members. Although this pattern is a dominant one, an antithesis is also presented. The public goods, private goods or club goods nature would determine the quality of the democratic outcomes; which are related to party institutionalization, political party financing and the overall electoral design.

Dr. Svitlana Chernykh (Australian National University)

Discussant: Mr. Marcus Spittler (Freie Universität Berlin / WZB)
Chair: Professor Pippa Norris, University of Sydney/Harvard University

The emerging literature on post-electoral protests has generated important insights, but it tended to use “elections” or the aggregate “opposition parties” as the unit of analysis rather than individual political parties. Not all opposition parties follow the same post-electoral strategy yet little attention has been paid to this variation. I contend that parties’ post-electoral decisions are shaped not only by the election but also by their individual characteristics, such as their prior political histories and ideology. I test the argument with an original dataset of over 300 political parties in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (1990-2009) using hierarchical linear modelling that captures the impact of both election and party-level characteristics on political parties’ decisions to reject electoral results. This study shows that approaching the phenomenon of post-election disputes from both the election- and the party-level offers a more accurate perspective of, and new insights into, the questions of post-electoral compliance.

Dr. Robert Horvath (La Trobe University)

Discussant: Professor Graeme Gill (University of Sydney)
Chair: Dr. Ferran Martinez i Coma (University of Sydney)

The recent referendum in Crimea and the elections in the separatist territories of Donetsk and Lugansk were monitored by a large contingent of European ultranationalists, who lavished praise on the fairness and legitimacy of voting processes that were condemned by the European Union as illegal and illegitimate.

This paper examines the growing involvement of ultranationalists in the monitoring of elections in the former Soviet space during the decade between Ukraine's 'Orange Revolution' of 2004 and the Russo-Ukrainian crisis of 2014. It shows how the Kremlin deployed 'election-monitoring organisations' created by ultranationalists to influence both the course of elections and perceptions of their legitimacy. By mimicking the discourse of established monitoring organisations, by highly selective reporting of abuses, and by enlisting observers from international ultra-rightist networks, these organisations were used to discredit candidates hostile to the Kremlin and to undermine the conclusions of established international monitoring structures such as the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.

The paper also seeks to explain the paradox that ultranationalists - radical opponents of liberal democracy - should have assumed such an implausible role as guardians of the electoral process. I argue that this development was a product of three factors. First, an influential current of 'European New Right' ideology emphasised the value of infiltrating civil society as a path to political influence and cultural hegemony. Second, ultranationalists' anti-Westernism and their contempt for democratic institutions made them willing participants in a struggle against Western democracy promotion. And third, the Kremlin offered major incentives to non-state actors that were prepared to collaborate in its 'soft-power' campaign to deter 'electoral revolutions' in the post-Soviet space.

Professor Wolfgang Merkel (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin - WZB)

Discussant: Professor John Keane (University of Sydney / Sydney Democracy Network)
Chair: Professor Pippa Norris (University of Sydney/Harvard University)

This article addresses the question of whether a 'crisis of democracy' is an invention of theoretically complex but empirically-ignorant theorists who adhere to an excessively unrealistic normative ideal of democracy. Evidence is considered at three levels: (i) quality of democracy indices developed by experts; (ii) survey reports of the opinion of the demos; (iii) a deeper analyses of crucial spheres of democracy. The results point in different directions. According to expert indices and polls, the message is: there is no crisis of democracy. Yet evidence about participation, representation, and the effective power to govern reveal unresolved democratic challenges, such as the exclusion of the lower third of the demos from participation, an inferior representation of their interests, and a loss of national democratic sovereignty in policy-making.

Professor Pippa Norris (Harvard University and University of Sydney

Discussant: Dr. Anika Gauja (University of Sydney)
Chair: Dr. Ferran Martinez i Coma (University of Sydney)

The spread of elections to all parts of the globe has been one of the most dramatic developments transforming our world during the twentieth century. Yet the quality of contemporary contests commonly fails. Contentious elections undermine the legitimacy of elected authorities, political participation, and stability in fragile states.

This talk, drawn from a new book forthcoming with CUP, seeks to determine the reasons why elections are undermined by numerous kinds of flaws.

Structural, international, and institutional accounts each provide alternative perspectives to explain general processes of democratization.

Assoc. Prof. Allen Hicken (University of Michigan)

Discussant: Ass. Prof. Ben Goldsmith (University of Sydney)
Chair: Dr. Ferran Martinez i Coma (University of Sydney)

We report the results of a randomized field experiment in the Philippines on the effects of two common anti-vote-selling strategies involving eliciting promises from voters. An invitation to promise not to vote-sell is taken up by most respondents, reduces vote-selling, and has a larger effect in races with smaller vote-buying payments. The treatment reduces vote-selling in the smallest-stakes election by 10.9 percentage points. Inviting voters to promise to “vote your conscience” despite accepting money is significantly less effective. The results are consistent with a behavioral model in which voters are only partially sophisticated about their vote-selling temptation.

Dr. Terence Wood (Australian National University)

Discussant: Dr. Peter King (University of Sydney)
Chair: Dr. Ferran Martinez i Coma (University of Sydney)

This paper seeks to explain why electoral malpractice takes the form it does in the Western Melanesian countries of Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. It uses cross and within case variation in the two countries to argue that the form and extent of electoral malpractice is a product, foremost, of three political economies. The first of these is a national political economy which produces incentives for Members of Parliament in both countries to neglect electoral process and systems. The second political economy is an international one, in which aid actors are afforded some power to serve as a countervailing force to a domestic tendency towards decaying electoral capacity. The third political economy is localised, to do with power and how campaigns play out in individual electorates. Thanks to weak national systems there is considerable scope for actors to engage in malpractice at a local level, although local-level balance of power, and something akin to local political culture, causes the degree of localised malpractice to vary considerably.

Dr. Ferran Martinez i Coma (University of Sydney)

Discussant: Dr. David Smith (University of Sydney)
Chair: Mr. Max Grömping (University of Sydney)

In recent years a growing literature focuses on how and why some election processes are viewed as having integrity while others lack it. Some scholars examine how individual voters view the process and their role in it while others study how a state’s structural characteristics (e.g. its economic development, the education levels of its citizens, and their experience with elections) shape the voting process. The relative importance of election dynamics themselves and the process of their evaluation, however, remain unclear. What stages of the election process are most important when evaluating elections? Put differently, if we know a ‘good’ election when we see it, what is the process by which we see it and what aspects of the election do we particularly focus on? We answer this question by considering three types of factors relevant to evaluating an election: (1) the characteristics of the country, (2) the characteristics of the evaluators, and (3) the characteristics of the election itself. We posit that a better understanding of how election dynamics shape perceptions of election integrity is crucial because these dynamics vary more over time compared to individual and state-level factors. We explain why certain parts of the election cycle are crucial to determining how an election is judged—especially the conduct of the election authority, the accuracy of voter registration, and the use of political violence. Empirical results using new data on over 91 elections held in 85 countries during 2013 and 2014 are supportive of our argument.

Dr. Armen Mazmanyan (Apella Institute, Yerevan, Armenia)

Discussant: Noric Dilanchian
Chair: Dr. Ferran Martinez i Coma (University of Sydney)

Over 35 countries all over the world empower their “Kelsenian” constitutional courts, specialized tribunals which maintain a monopoly over adjudication of constitutional matters (constitutional courts), to resolve electoral disputes. In the context of the debate on the pros and cons of electoral dispute resolution systems involving constitutional courts, this paper examines whether constitutional, vis-à-vis general courts, are better fit to maintain the higher standards of electoral integrity. This paper argues that electoral integrity often suffers from legalism wherever this is an entrenched legal tradition and that the choice of electoral dispute adjudication system in such contexts may be of importance for upholding international standards of electoral integrity. The paper defines legalism in the electoral context and argues that legal cultures affected by excessive legalism, such as those carrying the heritage of continental positivism on one hand, and Marxian legal scepticism on the other, have negative effect on electoral integrity by default. Electoral integrity is defined in terms of international commitments and norms on elections as provided in relevant treaties and other authoritative documents (Norris, 2014). Legalist traditions tend to write laws in a very technical and detailed manner, micro-managing human behavior to some substantial degree by stipulating multiple rules and procedures, and often give priory to these rules and procedures over universal values and fundamental principles, thus negatively affecting the standards of electoral integrity. Through a citation-count study of judicial decisions in four post-Soviet countries (Armenia, Moldova, Ukraine and Russia), the paper tests a proposition that constitutional courts are less vulnerable to legalism than general courts. The citation-count reveals the degree to which each type of courts are accustomed to referring to fundamental moral values such as freedom, fairness and equality, universally recognized human rights, and the relevant constitutional and international norms enshrining these. The method of citation-count analysis is adapted to testing and comparing the “judicial mindset” in both non-electoral and electoral contexts, and across the judicial jurisdictions and selected countries. The paper further examines the degree to which different courts in the target region have applied and activated such values and norms in confronting electoral malpractice in their countries.

Dr. Carolien van Ham (University of New South Wales)

Discussant: Dr. Ferran Martinez i Coma (University of Sydney)
Chair: Mr. Max Grömping (University of Sydney)

Over 90 per cent of the world’s states currently select their national leaders through multiparty elections. However, in Africa the quality of elections still varies widely, ranging from elections plagued by violence and fraud to elections that are relatively ‘free and fair’. Yet, little is known about trade-offs between different strategies of electoral manipulation and the differences between incumbent and opposition actors’ strategies. We theorize that choices for specific types of manipulation are driven by available resources and cost considerations for both incumbents and opposition actors, and are mutually responsive. We also suggest that costs of manipulative strategies are shaped by the level of democratization. We test our hypotheses on time-series, cross-sectional dataset with observations for 286 African elections from 1986 to 2012. We find that democratization makes ‘cheap’ forms of electoral manipulation available to incumbents such as intimidation and manipulating electoral administration less viable, thus leading to increases in vote buying. The future of democracy in Africa thus promises elections where the administration of elections becomes better and better but at the same time vote buying will increase. Not all things go together, at least not all the time. The future of democracy in Africa will mean more money in politics, more patronage and more clientelistic offers thrown around, at least in the short to medium term.