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This chapter shows that the manipulation of electoral institutions is a powerful means of retaining political power while permitting electoral competition. It also demonstrates that the manipulation of electoral institutions is often combined in complex ways with other forms of electoral malpractice. More often than not, electoral legislation is altered so as to facilitate other forms of electoral manipulation and corruption. This suggests that a narrow legalistic approach to electoral reform is likely to be less successful than a more holistic approach that combines appreciation of power structures and resources at different levels of society and the political system.

Electoral authoritarian regimes transgress democratic norms in severe and systematic ways. Grounded in democratic theory, the chapter first delineates the minimum norms of democratic elections. It then describes the repertoire of manipulative strategies authoritarian rulers may deploy to suffocate the democratic spirit of multiparty elections. Their strategies of manipulation are mutually substitutive. They include the banning and repressive treatment of parties and candidates, their exclusion from finance and mass media, the disenfranchisement and intimidation of voters, the design of discriminatory election rules, and the commission of electoral fraud. Due to normative and empirical ambiguities, the external boundary that separates electoral autocracies from electoral democracies is essentially contested. Their most salient internal boundary runs between hegemonic and competitive regimes that differ in their degrees of institutionalization. Hegemonic regimes display high levels of institutional certainty. They are in equilibrium. Competitive regimes show high levels of uncertainty. They are in disequilibrium.

The empirical explorations this book pursues into the internal dynamics of electoral autocracies worldwide are based on the original Dataset on Authoritarian Elections (1980–2022). This chapter describes its case selection and measurement decisions. It starts by discussing two alternative approaches for delineating authoritarian from democratic multiparty systems. One is the “alternation rule” that classifies multiparty systems as democratic once they have gone through their first electoral change in government. Alternatively, instead of looking at substantive results of elections as a litmus test of their democratic quality, one may rely on expert judgments, such as Freedom House political rights scores. The Dataset on Authoritarian Elections takes the latter route. The chapter explains its criteria of cases selection as well as its operational rules for identifying hegemonic regimes. In continuation, it delineates definitions, sources, measurement procedures, and frequency distributions for its core variables: electoral manipulation, electoral protest, and electoral competitiveness.

Do international actors enforce democratic norms in countries that hold flawed elections? Do their efforts make a difference? This chapter develops the theory of the causes and effects of norm enforcement. Beginning with simple assumptions about the interactions between the government, opposition and international enforcers, it argues that the likelihood of enforcement is shaped, at the country-level, by variation in geopolitical interests and in the quality of information about electoral misconduct. Turning to the domestic effects of enforcement, the chapter identifies biased institutions and a weak opposition as two key barriers to democratic change after flawed elections. By employing tools of conditionality and diplomatic engagement, international actors can mitigate these barriers and provide a crucial push for improved elections. Outside pressure is unlikely to directly alter the government’s preference for manipulation, however. Instead, it works by incentivizing institutional reform, encouraging opposition unity, empowering post-election protests, and increasing the opposition’s electoral support. Building from these mechanisms, the chapter derives testable hypotheses about the effects of enforcement, which are contrasted with alternative hypotheses about “passive” forms of international influence.

This chapter uses quantitative evidence to assess the effects of international conditionality and diplomatic engagement on electoral conduct and outcomes. It shows, in short, that enforcement works. Specifically, post-election conditionality—the wielding of concrete sticks and carrots—is associated with improvements in electoral quality in the next election, while pre-election conditionality is associated with opposition electoral victories. Softer tools of diplomatic engagement—mediation, diplomatic missions and shaming—instead are associated with immediate post-election concessions, namely, a decision by the incumbent to step down or cancel electoral results. Crucially, the efforts of international actors interact with, and augment, the effect of opposition protests, indicating that international validation and support are indeed key ingredients for the success of mass mobilization after flawed elections. The chapter concludes by probing the robustness and nuances of these findings. It shows, first, that enforcement by regional organizations proves to have the strongest and most consistent positive effects, which points to these organizations’ unique combination of leverage and legitimacy. Second, no evidence is found to support the idea that enforcement is imposed disproportionately in “easy” cases that are otherwise more likely to democratize. On the contrary, conditionality tends to be imposed in more intransigent regimes where change is harder to achieve.

This chapter develops the study's main argument as to the incentives under which state and nonstate actors will employ violent means of shaping electoral outcomes, in addition to alternatives such as vote buying, fraud, or programmatic competition. This argument posits that electoral violence is shaped by the balance of democratic institutions and corruption, which conditions the costs of being excluded from power and the benefits of winning office. In electoral authoritarian and hybrid regimes, rulers are reluctant to open themselves to the risk of democratic competition. The chapter then sets out an account of why violence might be used to amplify and/or complement other types of electoral manipulation, including vote buying and misconduct. The observable implications of this argument are detailed in the form of a series of testable hypotheses.

The majority of elections held around the world today are marked by systematic government interference and manipulation. But what consequences do governments face for engaging in electoral misconduct? Do international actors punish countries that violate democratic norms? Do these efforts make a difference? The goals of this book are two-fold: first, to explain variation in norm enforcement; second, to explain the impact of enforcement—when it is applied—on electoral conduct and outcomes. This chapter introduces the argument and research design of the study, and situates the book within the broader literatures on democratization, electoral misconduct, international institutions and international norms.

This chapter begins the empirical portion of the study. It introduces the data on electoral misconduct and examines global patterns. It documents where misconduct occurs, how frequent and intense it is, and how these patterns differ by region and regime type. Some unexpected conclusions emerge: misconduct is surprisingly prevalent even in democracies, in countries that are members of democratic international organizations, and in countries that have made formal international commitments to democracy. This evidence is inconsistent with the idea that membership in international institutions deters violations of democratic norms across the board, suggesting instead the need to account for country-specific variation in enforcement.

This chapter discusses nonstate electoral violence, exploring the circumstances under which nonstate actors resort to violent means to achieve their ends, how state-initiated violence and nonstate violence interact, and also how nonstate electoral violence is produced. It demonstrates a strong and consistent empirical association between violence committed by nonstate actors and corruption, together with a link between this form of violence and vote buying suggestive of carrot-and-stick tactics. The chapter then explores the use made by nonstate actors of violent electoral protest as a mobilizational device, and the techniques whereby politicians enlist vigilante groups and proxies to carry out high-risk forms of violence. Analytically, mobilizational violence can be understood as taking two principal forms: protests against state electoral manipulation and violence between competing informal groupings seeking to secure the loyalty of their clients. Case studies of Pakistan, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan, and Côte d'Ivoire help to probe these casual mechanisms and to analyze the production of electoral violence.

This chapter examines three country cases in which the international enforcement of democratic norms either failed to produce meaningful electoral change or had, at best, partial or superficial effects: Armenia, Kenya and Cambodia. Examining these cases generates insights about the scope conditions of the theory and sheds further light on the relationship between international actors and the opposition. The cases suggest, for instance, that in the absence of a minimally viable and cohesive opposition, international pressure is likely to produce only limited, cosmetic improvements in electoral quality. The ability of international actors to produce even marginal changes under such conditions depends, in turn, on the consistency and strength of the enforcement effort itself.

This chapter discusses the third mechanism populist presidents use to reproduce their power: the tilting of the electoral playing field. The chapter shows the centrality of free and fair elections in defining democracy. It then identifies and discusses the main characteristics of democratic elections. The remainder of the chapter shows how unconstrained populist presidents violate four central conditions of free and fair elections: the free formation of alternatives, the free formation of preferences, the freedom to express these preferences, and the neutral management of elections. The chapter argues that the illegal enabling of reelection and the elimination of term limits violate the free formation of alternatives; the restriction of political and civil liberties and unfair access to media undermine the free formation of preferences; voter intimidations and vote buying violate the freedom to express those preferences; and electoral fraud and institutional biases negate the neutral management of elections.

This chapter presents qualitative evidence that fleshes out the statistical relationship between international norm enforcement and democratic change. It examines contested elections in the Dominican Republic and Serbia. Both countries hail from regions of the world with strong regional regimes for promoting and protecting democracy. These cases support several key insights of the theory, namely, that the effect of enforcement is often gradual and delayed; that institutional reform constitutes an essential channel of international influence; that regional organizations are important players in mediating electoral disputes and promoting institutional change; and that opposition parties are empowered by international support. The cases underscore that enforcement does not merely correlate with opposition strength; rather, it exerts a causal effect on the opposition’s ability to translate mass outrage into democratic change.

While making objective rankings sounds like an appealing goal, there are at least two reasons why we may not have objectivity: ignorance and manipulation. Persons with less knowledge suffer from illusory superiority due to their cognitive bias, a phenomenon called the Dunning–Kruger effect. Omnipresent in society is not only ignorance but also manipulation. Manipulators have the intention of gaining personal advantage by adopting different tricks, and the chapter summarizes these tricks. Then the importance and the difficulties of measuring society are discussed. According to Campbell’s law, use of quantitative indicators will distort and corrupt the social processes they are intended to monitor. “Rank and yank” refers to an annual performance review process by which a company ranks its employees against one another, and it looks as though CEOs have the difficult problem of avoiding unhealthy dog-eat-dog situations in the workplace. The chapter then discusses how a particular social metric, the credit score, is calculated and how objective the result is. It argues that social scientists and computer scientists should cooperate to generate “ethical algorithms” to avoid social prejudice. Further, it is argued that quantification is an indispensable part of an evaluation process. Metrics are not a silver bullet, because they might be manipulated, but careful measurement is better than purely subjective opinion.