Out of the shadows: autocratic regimes, election observation and legitimation

ABSTRACT

Autocratic regimes have developed a new strategy to overcome the high costs of either fully complying or not complying with the international norm of external election observation. This article explains how many dictators and dominant parties deploy ‘shadow’ election observation groups over professional observation groups as part of a mock compliance strategy. By supplanting the identity of the group judging elections and displacing the normative standard being applied, autocratic regimes have sought to gain democratic-procedural legitimation via flawed elections. This argument is evidenced using case studies of parliamentary and presidential elections in Cambodia, Zimbabwe and Egypt, which show that legitimation driven by shadow observation groups has become a globally applied strategy. The conclusion offers policy proscriptions for how to counteract the deployment of these groups and what the emergence of this phenomenon means for the study of autocratic legitimation.

KEYWORDS:

• Autocratic regimes
• Cambodia
• elections
• election observation
• Egypt
• legitimation
• Zimbabwe

Acknowledgements

In addition to the anonymous referees and editor, the authors would like to thank Robert Carmichael and Catherine Morris for their helpful support on this article as well as Alexander Dukalskis and Johannes Gerschewski for their comments on earlier versions. Some parts of this article were made possible by the research stipend of the German Research Foundation, which was granted in the framework of a doctoral fellowship at the Research College ‘The Transformative Power of Europe’ at Freie Universität Berlin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maria J. Debre, Doctoral Candidate, Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies, Free University Berlin.

Lee Morgenbesser, Research Fellow, Centre for Governance and Public Policy and the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University.

ORCID

Lee Morgenbesser http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3062-1284

Notes

1. A norm is a ‘standard of appropriate behaviour for actors with a given identity’ (Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998, p. 891).

2. In this paper ‘autocratic regimes’ is a pseudonym for ‘electoral authoritarian regimes.’ According to Schedler (2006, p. 3), the latter ‘play the game of multiparty elections by holding regular elections for the chief executive and a national assembly. Yet they violate the liberal-democratic principles of freedom and fairness so profoundly and systematically as to render elections instruments of authoritarian rule rather than instruments of democracy.’

3. Norris, Frank, and Martinez i Coma (2014, 2015) ranked the Cambodia and Zimbabwe elections the fifth and sixth worst of the 73 parliamentary and presidential elections held that year (i.e. very low integrity); while Egypt’s election was ranked the thirteenth worst of the 127 carried out the next year (i.e. low integrity).

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.