Enhancing Electoral Integrity: Under Which Conditions Does UN Electoral Assistance Contribute to the Quality of Election?

Electoral assistance is an important element of democracy promotion activities of various international actors such as the United Nations, the European Union and the United States. Between August 2007 and December 2012, the United Nations alone assisted 36% of all national elections worldwide. Academic research on election assistance is limited, and it is still unclear in which contexts electoral assistance takes place nor what effects it has on electoral integrity. This paper seeks to empirically address this gap through the quantitative analysis of an original data set of all cases of UN electoral assistance between August 2007 and December 2012. For authoritarian contexts, the results suggest that elections supported by the UN have a higher quality than non-supported elections. Two plausible explanations might account for this difference. First, the UN might select those autocracies with better prospects for electoral integrity. Second, UN activities enhance electoral integrity even in authoritarian contexts.