Following the third wave of democratization, the number of countries holding regular elections for executive and legislative offices sharply increased: over 85% of states now select their national leaders through elections. However, while global norms for elections increasingly converged (Norris 2009, Hyde 2011), global practice shows a widely varying “menu of manipulation” (Schedler 2002, Lehoucq 2003). Thus, while most states hold formally democratic elections and commit to international standards for elections, the de facto quality of elections ranges from “free and fair” elections with genuine contestation to “façade” elections that are marred by manipulation and fraud. Clearly, research on electoral fraud is increasingly relevant.
This paper develops an explanatory framework of electoral fraud that builds on how considerations of
costs, benefits and the stakes of the race affect the probability of incumbent and opposition actors to engage in electoral fraud or otherwise undermine the integrity of the electoral process (building on Schedler 2002, Lindberg 2009, Levitsky and Way 2010, Birch 2011, Van Ham 2012). The theoretical framework distinguishes contextual factors that shape the incentive structure in which actors operate on the one hand, and actors’ subsequent decisions to engage in fraud (or not) on the other hand. By doing so, the paper develops a two-level model of electoral fraud that first identifies the historical, institutional and socio-economic factors shaping the base-level propensity for elections to be rigged, and then explains actor decisions to engage in fraud based on more immediate political factors.
The impact of the explanatory factors on electoral fraud is empirically tested with time-series cross sectional analyses using data on electoral fraud for over 800 elections from 1974 to 2009 in 97 third and fourth wave regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, Former Soviet Republics, Sub‐Saharan Africa, South America and Central America (Van Ham 2012).
