Parties and Post-Election Disputes: The Dilemma of Electoral Compliance

Despite the recent increase in studies of electoral compliance, few have wrestled with the conceptual and empirical difficulties that plague research on post-electoral disputes. What is electoral compliance? What action can a political party take to signify its rejection of electoral results? In this paper, I introduce the Electoral Compliance and Rejection (ECR) Data Collection Project that measures electoral rejection in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Africa. ECR uses the political party as the unit of analysis permitting users to manipulate the data for a wide variety of purposes. I first discuss the main strategies that political parties can use to reject electoral outcomes. Next, using ECR, I present the trends in electoral compliance around the world in the last 25 years. I conclude with an empirical analysis that investigates the effects of election-level and party-level characteristics on post-election disputes.