Agenda-building for Electoral Reform: Explaining Media Attention to Domestic Election Monitoring Initiatives

Domestic election monitoring organizations engage in ‘information politics’ (Keck & Sikkink 1998) with the dual goal of altering the cost-benefit calculations of politicians in the short term (first-order effects), and affecting electoral reform in the long run (second-order effects). Existing studies unpack the first-order effects through field experiments and show evidence that the presence of observers can serve as a deterrent to election fraud at the micro-level (Ichino and Schündeln 2012). But less is known about second-order effects and longer term consequences of election monitoring activities. This study makes a contribution to this emerging literature by proposing an agenda-building model of electoral reform. As outsiders to the political system, election watch groups first need to garner media attention for their group as the necessary pre-condition to getting the issue of electoral integrity onto the public and policy agenda. While some existing studies locate the driving factors of media attention for interest groups mainly at the issue-level or characteristics of the media system, this study argues that organizational characteristics are crucial determinants of media attention to domestic election monitoring initiatives. In particular, it expects that media attention is positively related to the resources a group commands, its level of professionalization – in particular its ability to ‘clone’ the requirements of journalists, and its organizational history and standing as an established and recognized social actor. It hence concurs with studies proposing a ‘power law’ of media attention – with very few resourceful, experienced and professionalized groups commanding a large amount of attention while the majority of groups go unnoticed. In investigating this thesis in a comparative perspective, the study uses new data from an organizational survey of 383 domestic election monitoring groups in 110 countries, measuring their experience, news-cloning abilities, and resources. This is combined with a measure of news attention towards these initiatives, derived from a Factiva query of newspaper articles mentioning the group in English and local-language dailies. In addition, the study draws on the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI) expert survey to monitor issue-salience, restrictions to domestic monitors, and the gatekeeping role of the media.