https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1488-4436
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ABSTRACT
Cultural and political economy theories linking a vibrant civil society to democratic outcomes expect domestic election monitors to provide a vaccine against democratic backsliding. The empirical track record of such groups, however, is mixed. Drawing from theories of interest representation and social movement research, I present a novel approach to studying the effect of observer groups. Conceptualizing monitors as agenda-builders, I contend that their potential impacts rely on two factors neglected by previous studies: access to the public’s agenda, and access to policymakers. I test the impact of election monitoring on electoral integrity using cross-national time-series data of all democratic backsliding and revival episodes in Asia from 1950 to 2018. I find that domestic monitors do have more than a placebo effect, but that their capacities to immunize against democratic regression are modest at best. When neither access to the public’s agenda nor access to policymakers are present, monitors are unlikely to halt backsliding. However, public attention becomes an effective resource where groups have policy access. This adds to studies of democratic backsliding, election monitoring, and interest groups.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization”; Croissant and Haynes, “Democratic Regressions.”
2 Electoral integrity is election conduct along the whole electoral cycle adherent to global human rights norms. Its antonym is electoral malpractice. See Norris, “The New Research Agenda Studying Electoral Integrity.”
3 Hyde, “Democracy’s Backsliding in the International Environment”; Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding.”
4 Vaishnav, Political Finance in India.
5 Cho and Kim, “Procedural Justice and Perceived Electoral Integrity.”
6 Kongkirati, “Thailand’s Failed 2014 Election.”
7 Aspinall and Mietzner, “Indonesian Politics in 2014.”
8 These are non-state, non-partisan actors witnessing and documenting electoral malpractice in their own country, and/or advocating for electoral reform. I use the terms “monitors”, “observers”, and “watchdogs” synonymously.
9 Peruzzotti and Smulovitz, “Societal Accountability in Latin America”; Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times.
10 Lean, Civil Society and Electoral Accountability; Nevitte and Canton, “The Role of Domestic Observers.”
11 Asunka et al., “Electoral Fraud or Violence”; Ofosu, “Do Fairer Elections Increase Responsiveness?.”
12 Ichino and Schündeln, “Deterring or Displacing Electoral Irregularities?.”
13 Sjoberg, “Autocratic Adaptation.”
14 Buzin, Brondum, and Robertson, “Election Observer Effects.”
15 Grömping, “Domestic Monitors.”
16 Coppedge et al., “V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v9.”
17 Hyde and Marinov, “Which Elections Can Be Lost?.”
18 Grömping, “More Bang for the Buck.”
19 Peruzzotti and Smulovitz, “Societal Accountability in Latin America”; Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding.”
20 Nevitte and Canton, “The Role of Domestic Observers”; Lean, Civil Society and Electoral Accountability in Latin America.
21 Ichino and Schündeln, “Deterring or Displacing Electoral Irregularities?.”
22 Buzin, Brondum, and Robertson, “Election Observer Effects.”
23 Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights.
24 Lean, Civil Society and Electoral Accountability in Latin America.
25 Hyde and Marinov, “Information and Self-Enforcing Democracy”; Bush and Prather, “The Promise and Limits of Election Observers.”
26 Little, “Elections, Fraud, and Election Monitoring.”
27 Donno, Defending Democratic Norms; Hyde, The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma.
28 Cobb, Ross, and Ross, “Agenda Building.”
29 Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability; Cobb, Ross, and Ross, “Agenda Building”; Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies.
30 Kollman, Outside Lobbying.
31 Grömping, “More Bang for the Buck.”
32 Ibid.
33 Graber, Processing the News, 105.
34 Hilgartner and Bosk, “The Rise and Fall of Social Problems.”
35 Thrall, “The Myth of the Outside Strategy.”
36 Bader, “Crowdsourcing Election Monitoring.”
37 Grömping, “More Bang for the Buck.”
38 Coffé, “Citizens’ Media Use.”
39 Grömping, “Domestic Monitors.”
40 Daxecker and Schneider, “Implications of Multiple Monitors.”
41 Bjornlund, Beyond Free and Fair.
42 McCombs and Shaw, “Agenda-Setting.”
43 Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible?
44 Mancini, “Media Fragmentation.”
45 Jungherr, Posegga, and An, “Discursive Power.”
46 Atkinson, Lovett, and Baumgartner, “Measuring the Media Agenda,” 374.
47 King, Schneer, and White, “How the News Media Activate.”
48 Stier, “Democracy, Autocracy and the News”; Roberts, Censored.
49 Hughes et al., “Expanding Influences Research.”
50 Vliegenthart et al., “Do the Media Set the Parliamentary Agenda?.”
51 Donno, Defending Democratic Norms, 27.
52 Kuntz and Thompson, “More than Just the Final Straw.”
53 Wouters and Walgrave, “Demonstrating Power.”
54 Berkhout, “Why Interest Organizations Do What They Do.”
55 Kastner, “Tracing Policy Influence of Diffuse Interests”; Binderkrantz and Rasmussen, “Comparing the Domestic and the EU Lobbying Context.”
56 Hanegraaff and De Bruycker, “Informational Demand Across the Globe.”
57 Grömping, “Domestic Monitors.”
58 Score of two or more in the V-Dem regime indicator v2x_regime. See Lührmann, Tannenberg, and Lindberg, “Regimes of the World (RoW).”
59 Defined as an overall drop of 0.05 or more on V-Dem’s Electoral Democracy Index (EDI) over any period of time, starting with an initial decline of at least 0.01, and stopping when EDI stagnates for four years or by an increase ≥0.02 in EDI. See Pelke and Croissant, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Autocratization Episodes.”
60 Ginsburg and Huq, “Democracy's Near Misses.”
61 The variable nelda28 from NELDA is recoded to 0 = there were reports but they did not reach a large audience, or there were no reports; and 1 = there were reports and they reached a large audience.
62 The indicator itself ranges from zero, where elections are fundamentally flawed to four, where there is only some inconsequential amount of human error.
63 See Norris and Grömping, Electoral Integrity Worldwide, 24.
64 Grömping, “More Bang for the Buck.”
65 The former are recognized through membership in professional associations. The latter focus primarily on other issues but occasionally observe elections.
66 Adding a value of one before taking the log.
67 Coffé, Kerr and Lührmann, “Public Trust in Elections.”
68 Dupuy Ron, and Prakash, “Hands Off My Regime!.”
69 Birch and Van Ham, “Getting Away With Foul Play?.”
70 Little, “Elections, Fraud, and Election Monitoring.”
71 Meyerrose, “Unintended Consequences of Democracy Promotion.”
72 For this depiction I use V-Dem’s Clean Elections Index, because it provides yearly data.
73 The average 5-year change in electoral integrity was considerably lower during backsliding episodes (M = –.05, SD = .21) compared to non-backsliding country-years (M = .06, SD = .19), t(120.54) = 4.976, p < .001.
74 Bjornlund, Beyond Free and Fair.
75 Note that V-Dem’s variable on domestic monitors, which codes only de jure conditions for observers, records 129 of the 131 elections as “observed.”
76 Among 112 elections under democracy, 51 were monitored. Judged by the zero to one Clean Elections Index used in , these had a significantly lower mean quality (M = .74, SD = .13) compared to the unobserved elections (M = .86, SD = .09), t(109.79) = 5.816, p < .001.
77 Pearson’s r = –.48, p ≤ 0.001.
78 See supplementary materials (Table A5) for this robustness check. The rationale is that erroneous attention to electoral malpractice may perversely instigate reforms detrimental to electoral integrity.
79 Since varied forms of malpractice may affect attention differently – e.g. subtle pre-electoral malpractice may draw less attention than blatant election-day fraud – I also run robustness models with V-Dem’s variables on “election-day irregularities,” “government intimidation,” and “voter registry inaccuracies” as predictors (supplementary materials, Table A4). These broadly support the results.
80 Reflecting the minimum and maximum observed values.
81 Dressel, “How Much Real Democracy?.”
82 Little, Hyde, The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma.
83 Coffé, Kerr and Lührmann, “Public Trust in Elections.”
84 de Bruycker, “Blessing or Curse for Advocacy?.”
85 Beyers, “Voice and Access.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Max Grömping
Max Grömping is Lecturer at the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University. He researches interest group politics, authoritarianism, and electoral integrity. His recent work is published in Political Communication, Governance, and Party Politics, among others.