Transparent elections: Domestic election monitors, agenda-building, and electoral integrity

Abstract

Holding elections has become a global norm, even in autocracies; at the same time, there is mounting evidence to suggest that flawed or failed elections pose serious risks for political stability, legitimacy, and participation. Scholars and practitioners alike increasingly see citizen election monitoring and advocacy groups to be a partial remedy to electoral malpractice. But existing studies about the impacts of domestic monitors have a number of shortcomings: they do not address the question of where and why citizen election monitors emerge; there is little agreement about the causal mechanisms by which domestic monitors would strengthen elections; and they fail to explain why some monitoring groups achieve desirable outcomes while the majority do not. In addressing these gaps, the present study theorizes and investigates empirically the causes and consequences of domestic election monitoring through the lens of agenda-building theory. Bottom-up movements and public interest groups have been successful in building agendas in a range of issue spaces, sometimes leading to quite rapid policy change. But similar successes have not materialized in the policy area of electoral integrity. The study developes the first systematic and globally comparative dataset of domestic election monitoring initiatives to investigate this puzzle. It encompasses more than 1,000 groups in 123 countries, and measures media attention to these groups, their organizational characteristics, and advocacy strategies, based on an organizational survey, news content analysis, and in-person interviews with activists. Drawing on this evidence, the research confirms the agenda-building model and demonstrates that only well resourced, media-savvy, and specialized groups attract public attention, the crucial necessary condition for agenda-building success, whereas the majority of groups remain unnoticed. This study argues that it should come as no surprise that civic groups have a limited ability to improve elections, given their struggle to garner attention. The study furthermore argues that this is the case because agenda-building in the issue space of electoral integrity is exceptionally difficult for a number of reasons: electoral integrity is a redistributive issue with very high stakes; domestic monitors predominantly operate under hybrid regimes where the institutional framework is detrimental to public interest articulation; and the groups struggle to legitimize themselves vis-à-vis their domestic audiences given their funding from ‘Western’ donors. These findings contribute to agenda-building theory by clarifying the importance of variation in issues, regimes, and actors for attention-getting. These factors have thus far been neglected due to the predominant focus in the literature on cases from North America and Western Europe. Overall, the study’s findings do not give much occasion for optimism. Only very dense, well-mediated, and well-resourced monitoring ecologies should be expected to make any impact on election integrity in the long run. The neglect of communication dynamics may have led existing explanations of observer influence to draw overly optimistic conclusions.