Getting Elections Right? New Perspectives on Explaining Election Integrity

Abstract

Research on election fraud and election integrity has rapidly developed in past years, addressing issues of conceptualization, measurement, and causal explanation. The emerging literature explaining why elections fail or succeed, has identified a number of factors shaping election integrity, ranging from socio-economic structural factors such as economic inequality and social heterogeneity, to institutional factors such as the electoral system and electoral management bodies, to explanations referring to strategic choices of political actors, based on the characteristics of the particular electoral game, such as electoral competition and the presence of election monitors. Yet, a number of questions remain less well understood: What are the trade-offs between different causal explanations? Under which conditions are certain determinants more important? What is the role of time and path-dependency in shaping election integrity? Is there regional variation in election integrity, and if so, why? And, are there trade-offs between different types of irregularities? Which actors use what combinations of manipulation? This panel invites contributions to research on election integrity that develop new perspectives on explaining election integrity, addressing any of the questions above. NB. This panel has 2 more paper proposals that the web-system did not allow us to enter.