Dr Susanne Schmeidl (University of New South Wales)
Discussant: Professor Astri Suhrke (Chr. Michelsen Institute, NO)
Chair: Dr Ferran Martínez i Coma (University of Sydney)

The limited progress of democratisation in Afghanistan must be seen through the lens of elite-versus-citizen analysis. While Afghan elites have treated elections instrumentally for narrow purposes to achieve or consolidate power, Afghan citizens have increasingly demonstrated support for the electoral institution. This article challenges a culturalist explanation that suggests limited experience with democracy as well as religious and cultural values can hamper democratisation. Instead, it proposes a political-institutional rationale that presents two key arguments about the problems with democratization in Afghanistan. First that there was a fundamental mismatch between the new institutions developed under the auspices of the US and international community and local conditions. Secondly, Afghan elites managed to manipulate these new institutions in their struggle for power creating negative hybridity in the form of neopatrimonialism. The result is a widening gap between Afghan citizens and elites, and by extension the international community that is seen as colluding with local elites under the guise of democracy assistance. The future of democracy in Afghanistan depends on elites catching up with the Afghan population in embracing democracy for what it is – demo kratia – the rule of the people.

Dr Lee Morgenbesser (Griffith University)
Discussant: Dr Aim Sinpeng (University of Sydney)
Chair: Professor Pippa Norris (Sydney and Harvard Universities)

This paper accounts for how authoritarian regimes employ flawed elections to achieve longevity.

Seeking to prioritise the contribution of legitimation to autocratic stability, it argues that ruling parties hold de jure competitive elections to claim what is termed autonomous legitimation. This denotes the feigning of conformity to the established rules of the constitution and the shared beliefs of citizens. Regardless of overall turnout and support, ruling parties aim to exploit the normative and symbolic value of elections in order to establish moral grounds for compliance within a dominant-subordinate relationship.

In support of this argument, the case of Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) is analysed in historical and contemporary terms. Since 1959, the PAP has used precisely-timed elections to extract one or more mandate types from citizens and, by extension, claim legitimacy. In particular, it has sort a mandate based on its response to an event, execution of a policy and/or collection of a reward. In the long run, autocratic stability has been achieved through a process of reciprocal reinforcement, which has combined autonomous legitimation with targeted co-optation and low intensity coercion. To conclude, the paper addresses what this finding means for electoral integrity in Singapore and beyond.

This seminar is co-organised by the Electoral Integrity Project and the Authoritarian Politics Research Cluster at USYD's Department of Government and International Relations.

Professor Pippa Norris (Sydney and Harvard Universities)

Discussant: Professor Jørgen Elklit (Aarhus University)
Chair: Dr Alessandro Nai (University of Sydney)

Do formal electoral systems determine how far contests meet international standards of electoral integrity? This question touches on some classic debates in the literature seeking to understand the reasons underlying electoral reforms and the effects of these changes. To examine these issues, Part I develops the conceptual framework to unpack the meaning of electoral integrity. Part II builds upon this understanding and sets out several alternative theoretical arguments why list proportional representation (PR) electoral systems are generally believed to strengthen of electoral integrity more effectively than majoritarian rules. Part III explains the evidence and data, including how electoral integrity is measured worldwide through the rolling expert survey on Perceptions of Electoral Integrity. Part IV presents the results of the analysis. The conclusion in Part V considers the findings and implications for strengthening electoral integrity and democracy around the globe.

Professor Mark Franklin (Trinity College)
Discussant: Professor Nikolay Marinov (University of Mannheim)
Chair: Professor Pippa Norris (Sydney and Harvard Universities)

This paper investigates party congruence with voters in left-right terms over the period of a quarter century since the late 1980s. By aggregating individual-level data collected for many countries over a long time-period to the birth-year-cohort level, and in conjunction with measures of electoral integrity created by the Electoral Integrity Project and perhaps from other sources, I attempt to determine whether differences in electoral integrity correspond to differences in party responsiveness to changes in voter support and to evolutions in voter preferences.

The initial version of the paper focuses on West European countries, but I hope to expand this to post-communist countries that are members of the European Union and for which data are available as a result of successive studies of elections to the European Parliament. I hope to be able to build on this start by moving from EES data to data collected at the time of national elections in the same countries and perhaps eventually to other countries included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems.

Dr Merete Bech Seeberg (Aarhus University)
Discussant: Dr Carolien van Ham (University of New South Wales)
Chair: Dr Ferran Martínez i Coma (University of Sydney)

Electoral violence is a major concern in both autocracies, democratizing regimes, and sometimes even in established democracies. But not all violence occurs between parties. Rather, much election-related violence arises as a result of intra-party competition over candidate selection prior to the national election campaign. Intra-party violence, although often emphasized in case studies, has never been systematically investigated on a cross-national basis.

This paper is the first in a special issue on intra-party violence and asks: What are the causes and triggers of intra-party violence during candidate selection processes? Taking the new literature on electoral violence as a starting point, the paper builds a framework for understanding intra-party violence during candidate selection processes. Societal factors such as ethnic fragmentation, control over coercive forces such as the military, police, and private militias, and the more general prevalence of violence (for instance in a post-conflict setting) are taken into account. But focus is also on the importance of competition (is the race close?) and stakes (how much power, control over resources, etc. will the eventual winner achieve?). In addition, factors specific to dynamics of intra-part violence, including the internal organization of the country’s major political parties, are taken into account.

In the following articles in the issue, this explanatory framework is put to the test in a number of African cases.

Professor Karen Bird (McMaster University)
Discussant: Professor Pippa Norris (Sydney and Harvard Universities)
Chair: Dr Alessandro Nai (University of Sydney)

There is fairly widespread agreement that ethnic and indigenous minorities deserve ‘better’ political representation, but less certainty on how to get there. How can we know whether ethnic quotas or alternative non-quota forms of representation for ethnic and indigenous groups are advisable? What can we learn from the wide range of countries that have established various formal or informal electoral mechanisms to promote the numerical representation of designated ethnic or indigenous groups?

Normative theories of political representation predict that these types of electoral measures should have a positive effect on political outcomes, leading to more inclusive institutions and discourse, a greater probability of non-discriminatory policy, and enhanced trust among minority groups in political institutions and processes of governance. But there has not yet been any systematic study to assess whether these promises have been realized, or to ascertain what kinds of mechanisms work best in particular contexts.

This paper presents a framework for comparing such mechanisms across countries and assessing their effects. It begins by elucidating the institutional and political-demographic context of such mechanisms, including the way that communities of identity align with electoral rules and boundaries. It then proposes a set of strategies for assessing the relative impact and effectiveness of various mechanisms, along dimensions such as numerical/descriptive inclusion, satisfaction with democracy, perceptions of electoral integrity, voter participation, electoral competitiveness, inter-ethnic trust and cooperation, and legislative responsiveness. Measured along these dimensions, it appears that electoral mechanisms for ethnic and indigenous representation are not all created equal. This paper will serve as a template for comparing and accumulating knowledge across cases.

Professor Nikolay Marinov (University of Mannheim)
Discussant: Professor Mark Franklin (Trinity College)
Chair: Dr Alessandro Nai (University of Sydney)

The project seeks to understand the conditions under which states choose to support the process of free and fair elections beyond their borders.

We know that when powerful states support democratic processes, this helps representative institutions become established. We do not know the conditions under which promoting democracy is an optimal strategy. This project argues that external interventions in elections take two principal forms: supporting specific candidates or supporting democratic processes. Election-eve statements in favor of a candidate, promises of aid, and even threats of invasion if the wrong party wins, illustrate the first, pro-candidate, type of intervention. Sending election observers, conditioning the flow of benefits to the country on clean elections, are examples of the second, pro-democracy, kind of intervention. We argue that the strategies of other states matter for the choice of policy.

Ultimately, the goal of this project is to develop fully hypotheses about elections as proxy wars among regional and global powers, and to test them in an innovative dataset. The work is the first to spell out the conditions under which international interest in elections leads to the strengthening of democratic procedures, as opposed to undermining free and fair competition. Its policy-relevance is significant. The new data will give rise to multiple spin-off projects.

Dr Anaïd Flesken (University of Bristol)
Discussant: Professor Karen Bird (McMaster University)
Chair: Max Grömping (University of Sydney)

Attitudinal research on political support consistently shows that electoral losers are less satisfied with the way democracy works in their country than electoral winners, and recent research suggests that the pattern extends to perceptions of electoral integrity: losers are more likely to report electoral malpractice than winners, and the effect is stronger if respondents lost repeatedly. Marginalized ethnic groups are, by their very definition, consistently losing, which is expected to undermine minorities’ perceptions of electoral integrity and, in the longer term, support for the political system as a whole. This paper examines ethnic status group differences in the perception of electoral integrity, using the electoral integrity battery included in the latest World Values Survey wave as well as corresponding expert assessments from the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Index. Contrary to widespread expectations, ethnic differences are insignificant or insubstantial; differences in perceptions of electoral integrity are explained mainly by political partisanship. The results suggest, first, that substantive representation is more important than descriptive representation, even in ethnically divided societies. Second, they suggest that the winner–loser gap in political attitudes more generally is not due to a psychological “sore loser” effect after elections but to the extent to which respondents feel represented in between elections.

Moderator: Dr Alessandro Nai (University of Sydney)

Max Grömping (University of Sydney)

Miguel Angel Lara Otaola (University of Sussex)

Andrea Fumarola (LUISS Guido Carli, University of Rome)

Max Gromping: Explaining media attention to domestic election monitoring initiatives

Domestic election monitoring is a major growth area of international democracy assistance. Existing studies have shown evidence that the presence of domestic observers deters or displaces electoral fraud at the micro-level (Ichino and Schündeln 2012). But less is known about longer term consequences of domestic election monitoring activities. This study contributes to this emerging literature by proposing an agenda-building model of electoral reform. As outsiders to the political system, election watch groups first need to garner media attention for their group as the necessary pre-condition to getting the issue of electoral integrity onto the public and policy agenda. While some existing studies locate the driving factors of media attention for social movements, NGOs, or interest groups mainly at the issue-level (Djerf-Pierre 2012) or characteristics of the media system (Siebert, Peterson & Schramm 1956), this study argues that organizational characteristics are crucial. In particular, it expects that media attention is positively related to the resources a group commands, its level of professionalization – in particular its ability to provide ‘information subsidies’ to journalists - and its organizational history and standing as an established and recognized social actor. It hence concurs with studies proposing a ‘power law’ of media attention – with very few resourceful, experienced and professionalized groups commanding a large amount of attention while the majority of groups go unnoticed (Danielian and Page 1994; Thrall 2006; Schlozman et al. 2012).

In investigating this thesis in a comparative perspective, the study uses new data from an organizational survey of 383 domestic election monitoring groups in 110 countries, measuring their experience, professionalization, and resources. This is combined with a measure of news attention towards these initiatives, derived from a Factiva query of newspaper articles mentioning the group in English and local-language dailies. In addition, the study draws on the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI) expert survey to monitor issue-salience, restrictions to domestic monitors, and the gatekeeping role of the media.

Existing research on the role of Electoral Management Bodies (EMBs) in election credibility has focused on their degree of independence and autonomy. This article examines the extent to which the support of political parties for EMBs also matters. This support is identified by the participation of parties in the appointment of EMB members, hypothesising that when parties are included they are more supportive of the EMB and therefore assume its activities and decisions as their own. Results show that although it is positive to include political parties in the appointment process of the EMB members, not all forms of inclusion yield the same level of benefits in terms of confidence in elections. This is demonstrated through logistic and multilevel regression of results from the Parliamentary Elites of Latin America (PELA) survey.

Electoral accountability has been typically identified with retrospective economic voting (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2007) even if scholars have gradually come to the point that it would not be sufficient to explain voters’ assignment of responsibility without considering other variables, in particular related to the political context (Anderson 2007). Recently, political scientists have stressed the role of procedural quality of elections in contributing to democratic legitimacy (Norris, 2014).

Low levels of political interest together with low levels of institutional and party system stability risk to undermine electoral accountability in the area. Moreover, survey data suggest that citizens’ perceptions of electoral malpractices erode trust and confidence in elected authorities, disincentive voter turnout and cause protests, undermining regime stability. Consequently, the general hypothesis is that electoral integrity would structure attitudes about electoral accountability in substantial ways, particularly in terms of confidence in electoral institutions. From this perspective, the quality of the electoral process would be able to integrate contextual factors in influencing electoral accountability in post-communist countries, filling the gap of legitimacy caused by the aforementioned factors.

Questioning the traditional assumptions of economic voting theory and demonstrating the necessity of integrating the ‘contextual variables’ to explain their influence on electoral accountability in 11 Central Eastern European EU Member States, the paper aims to show the relevance of the electoral integrity in shaping voting behavior and strengthening electoral accountability in the area employing a multilevel analysis using aggregate and individual level from the Round 6 of the World Value Survey (WVS).