A Matter of Misunderstanding? Explaining (Mis)Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Across 25 Different Nations

Accurate citizen perceptions of election integrity are essential for democracy. If elections are rigged, ideally citizens would notice and mobilize and protest to hold their government to account and push for clean elections. Conversely, if elections are clean, ideally citizens would notice this as well, so elections can legitimize the elected government, foment political trust, satisfaction with democracy, and acceptance by citizens of decisions made by the elected government. Misperceptions of election integrity, on the other hand, can be problematic for democracy. They may lead to either unduly positive or unduly negative evaluations of election integrity by citizens. If elections are rigged and citizens perceive them to be clean, elections with low levels of election integrity may nevertheless help to legitimize and stabilize electoral authoritarian rule. Conversely, if elections are clean and citizens perceive them to be rigged, elections may end up triggering unwarranted civil conflict and destabilizing democracy (cf. the United States and Brazil). In this paper, we study (mis-)perceptions of electoral integrity in 25 countries using novel survey data collected in February 2023 in a variety of countries across the world with different levels of electoral integrity and combine these with EIP’s Perceptions of Electoral Integrity expert data. We build on the burgeoning literature on citizens’ perceptions of electoral integrity (a.o., Bowler et al. 2015, Kerr 2018, Lundmark et al. 2020, Coffé 2017, Norris et al. 2020, Enders et al., 2021; Flesken and Hartl, 2018, Karp et al., 2018, Mochtak et al. 2021) and propose an information-seeking and processing account of misperceptions, bringing in insights from political communication research on social identity theory, selective exposure mechanisms and echo chambers, as well as insights on the different roles of social media in different regime types (Theocharis et al. 2017). We argue that misperceptions of election integrity are likely to be driven to an important extent by (1) the different sources of information available to citizens and (2) the degree to which they trust those sources. We include a wide array of sources, ranging from direct experiences with elections by participating in them, to information gained from social networks as friends and family, to information via politicians, to information via social and traditional media. The extent to which citizens trust these sources will likely determine the impact of information available on (mis)perceptions of election integrity. We expect in general that some of these sources, most notably social media, are most likely to spread misinformation about elections, and therefore are most likely to increase misperceptions of election integrity, whereas traditional media should decrease misperceptions of election integrity. However, we expect these differences to be (partly) context-specific. In contexts where media freedom is low and traditional media is likely under significant control of incumbent governments, social media more often serve as an alternative source of correct information, and we, therefore, expect this relationship to reverse: with citizens who trust traditional media being significantly more likely to misperceive election integrity than citizens who are more trusting of social media.