Getting Away With Foul Play? How Oversight Institutions Strengthen Election Integrity

Electoral integrity is increasingly being recognised as an important component of democracy, yet scholars still have limited understanding of the circumstances under which elections are most likely to be free, fair and genuine. This paper posits that effective oversight institutions are both necessary and sufficient in scrutinising the electoral process. We further argue that deficiencies in electoral management can be largely compensated for via one or both of the other two institutional checks: an active and independent judiciary and/or an active and independent media. These hypotheses will be tested on a cross-national time-series dataset of national-level elections in over 90 third and fourth wave regimes held between 1990 and 2010.