Strategies of actors influencing electoral integrity: Comparison of the Czech and Slovak case

The quality of elections differs across countries while (un)problematic elections are not made by themselves. The drivers of the different trajectories of election integrity in a given context are political actors which are interested in electoral outcomes. The goal of this study is to examine the behaviour of important actors which influence the quality of parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic and Slovakia since elections in 1998. The text attempts to answer these questions: “What are the strategies of political actors in electoral processes which could improve or decrease the quality of elections?” “Do these tactics differ across observed countries?” “Do they differ in time?” The Czech Republic and Slovakia shared the history in common state prior to 1993. After its split, the quality of elections has had different trajectories. At the same time, the contextual explaining indicators (which proved to be significant for the outcome) used in recent studies (e.g. Birch 2011, Van Ham 2012, Lindberg 2009, etc.) can be seen as relatively similar with an exception of Slovakia’s higher social heterogeneity. Keeping that in mind, it is possible to compare the two similar countries on the level of electoral stakeholders’ behaviour. It could give the impression that the quality of elections is higher in Czech because of “better” or more “moral” elites which are not interested in influencing elections wrong way. But is that true? Speaking about the post-transitional era, the new democratic elections cannot, from their nature, prevent previous “undemocratic” incumbents from candidacy. The uncertainty of electoral outcomes must be achieved (Przeworski 1991: 13). It means that some elites from previous era can be present in the legislative body. Therefore, the assumption that the behavior (or thinking) of these actors (and also some others who had grown in the undemocratic era) has completely changed under new circumstances can be rejected. In electoral studies, there are three main branches of literature dealing with actors’ (non-voters) behaviour, i.e. studies about undemocratic regimes (e.g. Magaloni 2010), transitional literature (e.g. Bermeo 2010), and electoral engineering (e.g. Benoit 2004; Colomer 2004). These studies are not always necessarily directly connected to the elections’ quality but their outcomes could improve the understanding of actors behaviour under different conditions. Based on these studies it is built the framework for analysis of actors’ strategies. This framework is constructed (based on Mozaffar and Schedler 2002) in a way to what kind of goal is to be followed by certain actors. Specific tactics are based mainly on the work of Schedler (2002; 2013), Mozaffar and Schedler (2002), and Birch (2011). The analysis consists of different kinds of sources. Among these are most important parties’ strategic documents (programmes), secondary analyses (providing the explanation of behaviour), and news (offering information about behaviour on daily basis). The results will provide the description of main electoral stakeholder’s behaviour which allows to better understanding of what stands behind the different electoral quality, i.e. whether it is different behaviour or rather other constraints which were not captured by recent quantitative studies.