Perceptions of electoral integrity and political participation across cultures and contexts: Conceptual refinements and new empirical evidence

The quality of modern representative democracies is inherently tied to the quality of the electoral process through which political leaders and governments are selected. But how do citizens react when they feel that elections – as pivotal mechanism for making their voices heard in the political process – are rigged? Do they descend into complete political apathy, or do they seek to make themselves heard via different participatory channels? Previous research on the behavioral implications of citizens’ views about the integrity of elections highlights that citizens who feel that elections are rigged tend to abstain more often from elections, vote more often for opposition and populist parties or spoil their vote in case they do turn out, and are more inclined to use elite-challenging forms of political behavior, such as participation in demonstrations or explicitly protesting against the outcome of elections. While these insights have undoubtedly advanced our understanding of the behavioral consequences that emanate from citizens’ electoral integrity beliefs, existing studies have failed to consider (1) the conceptual breadth of citizens’ views about the integrity of elections and (2) the context-dependency of the relationship between electoral integrity perceptions and political participation across different political systems and cultures. Against this backdrop, I aim to contribute to the burgeoning literature on the consequences of citizens’ electoral integrity beliefs in two ways: First, I argue that a conceptual distinction between perceptions of electoral integrity and perceptions of electoral malpractice promises a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which views about the quality of elections may motivate and translate into different modes of political participation. Second, I argue that the strength of the relationship between perceptions of electoral integrity and modes of political participation is conditioned by the de facto quality of elections across cultures and contexts. I test these propositions empirically by combining and analyzing individual- and contextual-level data from the World Values Survey, the European Value Study, and the Electoral Integrity Project covering 75 countries and the period 2011-2021. The empirical results based on three-level mixed-effects logistic regression models show that (1) the motivational impetus to become politically active via different modes of political participation varies for perceptions of electoral integrity and perceptions of electoral malpractice. Moreover, the results show that (2) the respective strength of the relationships between perceptions of electoral integrity and malpractice on the one hand, and different modes of political participation on the other, differs across cultures and contexts with varying levels of de facto election quality. These findings provide new insights on the behavioral implications of citizens’ views about the quality of elections, highlighting their (conditional) role in spurring different types of electoral and non-electoral behaviors across variegated political systems and cultures. As such, the present study also contributes to broader debates about the drivers and consequences of democratic erosion and the resilience of modern representative democracies more generally.