Electoral Malpractice and Political Trust in Democratic and Autocratic Regimes

Electoral malpractices seem to be on the rise almost everywhere. While clearly problematic and compromising legitimacy from a normative point of view, we currently know little about the consequences of electoral malpractice for empirical legitimacy: does electoral malpractice reduce citizens’ trust in the political system? As electoral malpractices violate the basic rules of the (democratic) game, citizens should react to them with the withdrawal of political trust. However, are these negative effects the same in any type of political regime? Can we expect citizens to penalize electoral malpractice to the same extent in autocracies as they do in democracies? The present contribution proposes that electoral malpractice has a pronounced negative effect on political trust only in democracies but not in autocracies. It argues that citizens in democracies are primed to expect elections to be generally free and fair, making them more sensitive towards violations of the electoral rules than citizens in autocracies, who might – based on past experience – already expect at least some irregularities surrounding the electoral process. At the same time, media freedom plays a crucial role in moderating the effect of electoral malpractice on political trust: only in democracies, where the media are free to report on allegations of electoral fraud, will citizens receive sufficient information about electoral malpractices to actually form their political attitudes accordingly. In autocracies, especially the ones with an effective censorship apparatus, citizens are unlikely to actually learn about electoral malpractices unless they directly experience irregularities. For both reasons, we would therefore expect the negative effect of electoral malpractice to be weaker in autocracies than it is in democracies. The present contribution empirically tests this proposition by combining V-Dem data on the electoral process with a vast variety of survey data (Afrobarometer, AmericasBarometer, Arab Barometer, Asian Barometer, Latinobarómetro, World Values Survey). Covering more than 100 contemporary political systems around the globe, it uses multi-level structural equation modeling to analyze how electoral malpractice affects political trust in both democracies and autocracies.