In the last years, questions dealing with the causes and consequences of fraudulent elections have won popularity among political scientists. Scholars has been focusing on how fraudulent elections affect party systems; or exploring under which type of electoral system these acts of fraud are observed more often; or under which conditions incumbents decide to commit electoral fraud. However, there has been little attention in exploring why a country would allow a third-party to monitor the elections and, likewise, why an international institution – or NGO – would be interested in deploying a mission to observe such election. In this paper, I address this issue arguing that electoral observation missions (EOMs) are observed when a particular set of conditions are met. EOMs occur in developing countries that need to enhance trade partnerships and increase foreign aid. Political competition is also important: in those democracies with stronger opposition forces, EOMs are more likely to be observed. On the third-party side, EOMs should be observed not only in countries which are known by the organizations responsible for the missions but also in young economically dependent regimes. These hypotheses are tested using a novel dataset and using a selection-model that takes into account the partial visibility of the data.
