Electoral Integrity and Procedural Justice

Regular elections is one of the main political mechanisms that links people and politics. Besides electoral integrity, however, other non-electoral political processes of political representation are important for the perception of procedural justice in established democracies. For instance, the perception of throughput legitimacy (Schmidt 2013) is related to voters’ perception of procedural justice and can explain additional variation in satisfaction with regular electoral results. This is how a ‘hidden challenge’ of electoral integrity is identified in the context of an increasingly contested election-focused interpretation of political representation. The paper follows a mixed-methods design. First, comparative survey data from the European Social Survey and the Electoral Integrity Project are combined to test the relationship between electoral integrity, other non-electoral dimensions of political representation, and the attribution of procedural justice to democratic systems. In a second step, experimental survey data of selected countries is used to test this relationship.