The Evolution of Electoral Integrity in New Democracies and Electoral Authoritarian

Regimes

Sarah Birch
University of Glasgow
Sarah.birch@glasgow.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: Popular protests following elections in electoral authoritarian states have become
more common in recent years, yet few studies have analyzed this phenomenon. This paper draws
on the literatures on contentious politics and electoral integrity to provide a novel account of
post-electoral protest. The main argument is that because in the wake of the third wave of
democratization, the politics of electoral reform revolves mainly around the implementation of
democratic electoral principles rather than around the principles themselves, electoral
authoritarian leaders tend to employ forms of electoral abuse that entail giving unfair advantage
to pro-regime electoral competitors, rather than excluding either voters or competitors from the
electoral arena altogether. This means that citizens have electoral rights formally accorded to
them but episodically abused, a pattern which is conducive to generating grievance. When such
regimes ramp up forms of manipulation that favor pro-regime political forces, the resultant
deterioration in election quality can then serve as a focal point which serves to mobilize citizens
to mount mass protests. In as much as protest can, under the right circumstances, lead to reforms
which improve electoral integrity, one of the implications of this argument is that elections often
have to get worse before they get better.
Keywords: Post-electoral protest, electoral integrity, electoral misconduct, contentious politics,
electoral reform

THIS IS A VERY ROUGH PRELIMINARY DRAFT ONLY PLEASE DO NOT CITE

Paper prepared for presentation and the University of Sydney, 12 August 2014
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Anyone with a television will have noticed that mass protests following the announcement of
election results are increasingly occupying their screens. Though many have undoubtedly noted
this fact in passing, we have as yet little understanding of what accounts for the recent rise in
post-electoral protest. Several decades of research on contentious politics, starting with Mancur
Olsons The Logic of Collective Action (1965) and Ted Robert Gurrs Why Men Rebel (1970),
have provided us with considerable insight into the conditions under which popular mobilization
and protest activity emerge. At the same time, a burgeoning literature on electoral integrity and
manipulation sheds light on the dynamics of electoral misconduct and the impact of electionrelated mass mobilization on regime behavior. Yet we have very limited understanding of the
circumstances in which election-related mass mobilization occurs. This paper seeks to fill this
gap by developing a novel account of post-electoral protest.
Previous scholarship has largely framed post-electoral protest as the result of electoral
fraud or other forms of electoral malpractice (e.g. Norris, 2012; Svolik and Chernyk, 2012;
Thompson and Kuntz, 2009; Tucker, 2007), but this fails argument to explain why most
fraudulent elections are not followed by major protests. This paper proposes an answer to this
puzzle that focuses on the specific characteristics of contemporary competitive authoritarian or
electoral authoritarian states in creating the preconditions for mass mobilization around
election-related grievances, together with the role of increases in electoral malpractice from one
election to the next in triggering protest. In a nutshell, the argument put forward here is that
because since the third wave of democratization the politics of electoral reform has revolved
mainly around the implementation of democratic electoral principles rather than around the
principles themselves, contemporary electoral authoritarian leaders tend to employ forms of
electoral abuse that entail giving unfair advantage to pro-regime competitors, rather than

excluding either voters or competitors from the electoral arena altogether. This means that
citizens have electoral rights formally accorded to them but episodically abused, a pattern which
is conducive to generating grievance. When such regimes ramp up electoral misconduct, the
resultant deterioration in election quality serves as a focal point which mobilizes mass publics to
protest.
There are a number of reasons why leaders might increase their use of electoral
malpractice: they may be suffering from a decline in popularity due to poor policy delivery;
alternatively, traditional vote-winning strategies based on clientelism may falter in the wake of
socio-economic development or decreased state capacity to pay off target groups; or increased in
electoral malpractice may result from internal power-struggles within the regime and the desire
of a new leader to consolidate their grip on power (Birch, 2011; Donno, 2013b; van Ham, 2013).
But whatever the reason why manipulation of the electoral process has increased, the result can
be expected to be an increased propensity of citizens to mobilize against electoral abuse. Protest
can then under the right conditions be the catalyst for lasting reforms which lead to a long-term
improvement in electoral integrity.
This argument unfolds as follows: the first section of the paper surveys the historical
context that has led to the recent rise in the potential for post-electoral protests. The second
section develops hypotheses about the relationship between changes in electoral integrity and the
occurrence of electoral protest. The third section provides cross-national empirical evidence of
the circumstances under which post-electoral protest takes place. A final section concludes.

I Electoral Rights and Electoral Practice

Election is an ancient institution that has only in modern times been harnessed to the ends of
representative democracy (Katz, 1997, chap. 2; Posada-Carb, 1996; Staveley, 1972). The
increasing importance of elected assemblies as tools of governance in the 18th and 19th centuries
was the first stage in this process. Since that time, representative democracy has evolved along
two principal fronts: elected representatives (assemblies and executives) have gradually eclipsed
non-elected institutions, and elections have come increasingly to embody values we associate
with freeness, fairness and credibility.
It is the second of these developments that is of relevance to the concerns of this paper.
Three key phases or waves, to use Samuel Huntingtons terminology (Huntington, 1991), can
be identified in the evolution of standards of electoral integrity. The first and second of these
phases revolved around the increasing inclusivity of elections, and can be understood in terms of
Dahls core democratic dimensions of participation and contestation (Dahl, 1973). In the first
wave of electoral reform, which began in Europe and the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries
and was largely complete by the mid-20th century, franchises were expanded, and the entire adult
citizenry was, with limited exceptions, gradually incorporated into electoral processes
(Przeworski, 2008; 2011). By 1945, virtually all developed states had accepted universal
suffrage, as had a number of non-democratic and less-developed states. There are of course
exceptions, such as Switzerland, which only granted women the vote in 1974, the United States
and Australia, which imposed effective restrictions on voting by blacks till the 1960s, and South
Africa, where genuine universal suffrage was established only in 1994. There also remain a

handful of countries that do not currently hold direct national-level elections at all.1 However,
franchise inclusivity was largely achieved by the end of the Second World War.
The second major wave in the development of modern standards of electoral integrity
took place largely in the immediate post-Cold War period and is associated with inclusivity: the
opening of electoral systems to competition by virtually all parties and individuals who wish to
take part in the electoral process. This development was associated with a decline in the number
of single-party regimes and the increase in the number of competitive authoritarian or electoral
authoritarian regimes in the post-Cold War Era (Levitsky and Way, 2010; Schedler, 2013).
Whereas the first wave of electoral reforms effectively eliminated voter exclusion, the second
wave dramatically reduced the number of states that formally limited the range of parties and
candidates which were, in theory at least, allowed to compete in elections (Diamond, 2002;
Gandhi, 2008: 40; Schedler, 2013: 3).
For several decades commentators used the terminology of free and fair to describe
elections. Though this language has somewhat fallen into disuse in recent years, we can say that
the first two waves in the evolution of electoral integrity were largely about elections becoming
freer, in the sense that electoral institutions were reformed so as to bring about greater formal
inclusion. By contrast, the third wave of electoral reform has largely revolved around making
elections fairer by creating a level playing field for competition. Of course, the manipulation of
electoral procedures has for centuries been an aspect of electoral competition, and periodic
reforms to address problems such as undue influence and vote-buying have long been debated.

1 These include

Brunei, the Peoples Republic of China, Eritrea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia

and the Vatican City State.

5

However, it has only been recently that the focus of efforts to improve elections has fallen
squarely in the implementation of electoral procedures, rather than on the establishment of basic
electoral rights.
This third wave of electoral reform, which is ongoing, began to gain momentum in the
wake of the third wave of democratization in the final years of the 20th century, when there was a
growing realization that many of the states that had recently opened up their electoral processes
to multiparty competition nevertheless carried out elections that were fundamentally flawed in
many ways (Bjornlund, 2004; Schedler, 2002a).
In the contemporary world, there are very few states that hold no elections to nationallevel institutions, and there are also few that impose significant suffrage restrictions. There are a
number of what are often termed hegemonic authoritarian states (Diamond, 2002; Donno,
2013a; Levitsky and Way, 2010) that impose substantial effective restrictions on competition,
such that regime opponents are regularly denied ballot access. Yet in most states with problem
elections, formal electoral rights of inclusion are guaranteed, and the principal obstacles to
electoral integrity revolve around de facto rather than de jure inclusiveness (Birch, 2011;
Brownlee, 2009; Donno, 2013; Schedler, 2013). It follows that the main objects of dispute in
states that hold problematic elections tend in the contemporary period to be those pertaining to
electoral fairness, and when reforms are introduced, they tend to involve such measures as
guaranteeing independent electoral commissions, improving voter registers and ensuring that
there are impartial electoral dispute resolution mechanisms available to all electoral actors.
The result has been a gradual shift from exclusion to bias as a means of manipulating
elections, and the argument proposed here is that this shift has had important implications for
how mass publics react to electoral abuse. Whereas previously the terrain of contestation had

been largely about specific rights the right to vote and the right to stand for election now the
grounds for grievance about elections are much more likely to revolve around how elections are
conducted on the ground. In other words, objections to electoral conduct are more likely to focus
on the implementation of the basic principles subtending elections than on the basic principles
themselves. Granted, electoral laws are common objects of complaint; indeed, a recent study has
found that the manipulation of electoral laws to be the most common form of manipulation in
three regions of the worlds between 1995 and 2007 (Birch, 2011). Nevertheless, in only a small
minority of these cases was the basic right to take part in an election either as a voter or as a
candidate is at issue. In temporal terms, there is now a greater focus on what goes on
immediately before, during and after elections. For example, elections in the Soviet Union were
fairly low-key affairs, as the script underlying them was well-known to all those involved;
nothing that happened during the electoral process was at all likely to affect the fundamental fact
that there was only ever one candidate on the ballot paper. In post-Soviet Russia, by contrast, the
right to competition is constitutionally guaranteed, and even if the results of recent electoral
contests have been foregone conclusions, there has been far greater focus both domestically and
internationally on how elections are carried out (McAllister and White, 2011).

II Electoral Integrity and Post-Electoral Protest

The behavioral implications of this shift from contestation over rights to contestation over
processes have resulted from the fact that actors are in contemporary electoral authoritarian
states typically included in the electoral process, but then cheated of fair treatment. In other
words, they are given a stake in electoral institutions, and then left to watch their stake eroded by
manipulative practices.

We know from the social-psychological literature that humans are generally lossaverse, in the sense that - contrary to traditional utilitarian expectations - the loss of existing
assets is viewed more unfavorably than failure to gain new assets (Kahneman and Tversky,
2000). The sense of having been cheated, of having something given and then stolen or taken
away, thus has greater potential to lead to widespread grievance than the absence of formal
electoral rights. Being formally included but effectively disenfranchised is also more likely to
generate episodic disquiet and thus mobilization; hence electoral processes are the ideal
background for contentious politics. Elections are predictably circumscribed in time, they follow
well-defined, highly ritualized patterns, and they involve virtually the entire adult population
(Bunce and Wolchik, 2011: 16). It is not surprising that repertoires of contentious activity should
develop in many contexts where elections are viewed as being unfair (e.g. Blaydes, 2011; Bunce
and Wolchik, 2010; 2011; Eisenstadt, 2004; Tarrow, 2011). As Joshua Tucker puts it, in a
manipulated election for once, the entire country is experiencing the same act of abuse
simultaneously (Tucker, 2007: 541).
Thus when electoral rights are formally granted but periodically abused during the
election contest, the circumstances are ideal for the staging of a mass protest. Moreover, this
combination of circumstances has become more common since the rapid spread of multiparty
elections during the third wave of democratization that kicked off in the mid-1970s and gained
steam in the 1980s. An indicator of post-electoral protest in Susan Hyde and Nikolai Marinovs
National Elections Across Democracies and Autocracies (NELDA) dataset allows us to chart the
rise in electoral protests over time.2 As Figure 1 show, the 1980s is precisely the period during

This is Variable 29 of the National Elections Across Democracies and Autocracies dataset (v3),

http://hyde.research.yale.edu/gfnelda/.
8

which post-electoral protests began to increase, and they have become more common as
competitive authoritarianism or electoral authoritarianism has reached more countries.
-

Figure 1 about here -

It is worth noting, however, that although most elections are beset with problems of some
kind, only a minority are followed by mass protests. A total of 417 protests in 2,974 of the
elections in the NELDA dataset were followed by protests (14.0 percent), so mass
demonstrations following elections are still by no means the norm. The question that arises from
this observation is: what are the circumstances under which post-electoral protests likely to
occur? This question has received limited attention from comparative political scientists. The
spate of studies that followed in the wake of the colored revolutions in Central and Eastern
Europe document how in case after case, worsening electoral irregularities led groups of citizens
to take to the streets in protest (Beachain and Polese, 2010; Beissinger, 2007; Bunce and
Wolchik, 2009; 2010; 2011; Kalandadze and Orenstein, 2009; White, 2010; Tucker, 2007).
These protests were less than successful in countries such as Azerbaijan and Belarus, but in
Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, anti-fraud movements led to wholesale changes of power that
improved the quality of electoral conduct (at least temporarily). This literature has identified a
number of factors associated with the success of the colored revolutions, including incumbent
turnover at the time of the election, well-organized and resourceful opposition coalitions and
international assistance to grassroots organizations. But analyses of the determinants of postelectoral protest have yet to be extended by many scholars to the large-N setting. An important
exception includes the work of Pippa Norris, who finds using survey data that lack of confidence

in electoral integrity encourages political activism at the individual level (Norris, 2012; 2014).3
The question that concerns us here is how individual-level willingness to engage in activism
leads to large-scale protests, which require groups of citizens to coordinate and organize in order
to overcome the well-known collective action problems that beset attempts at popular
mobilization (Olson, 1965).
It thus makes sense to delve deeper into the literature on contentious politics in order to
specify further the circumstances under which post-electoral protests will occur. Ted Robert Gurr
recognized long ago that when repression is in steady state, people do not tend to rebel; it is
when circumstances change that protest occurs, as peoples expectations and sense of what they
are entitled to then deviate from their perception of what they will in fact experience
(capabilities in Gurrs terminology), leading to relative deprivation which fuels frustration and
the propensity toward aggression (Gurr, 1968; 1970). Gurr does not cite Kahneman and
Tverskys (contemporary) work on loss aversion, yet he does point to the same psychological
phenomenon as being at the root of politically rebellious action: Men [sic] are likely to be more
intensely aggrieved when they lose what they have than when they lose hope of attaining what
they do not yet have (Gurr, 1970: 50).
Though it has been hugely influential, Gurrs work has also been criticized on theoretical,
methodological and empirical grounds. It is the theoretical framework subtending his grievancebased approach that is of relevance here. The most damning criticism of Gurrs approach is one

A formal model proposed by Milan Svolik and Svitlana Chernyk (Slovic and Chernyk, 2012)

suggests that the occurrence of protests will be conditioned by a range of political and
institutional factors, but these scholars do not provide empirical evidence to test their claims.

10

that applies to any explanation whose locus is primarily the individual: protests and other forms
of contentious practice of not simply occur because large numbers of people have a propensity to
engage in such activity; they are organized events which take place as the result of complex
interactions between regime elites, opposition elites and ordinary citizens who are mobilized to
take part. Only in this way is it possible to overcome collective action problems.
Subsequent writing on contentious politics has sought to deal with this issue, while at the
same time building on Gurrs insights. This extensive body of research identifies two broad sets
of factors that enable collective action involving popular mobilization. The first category of
factors is resources, which include structural aspects of a state such as overall level of socioeconomic development and urbanization, as well as access to and developments in
communications technology, which is key to disseminating ideas, building value-based
communities and mobilizing potential supporters (e.g. Dalton, van Sickle and Weldon, 2010;
McCarthy and Zald, 1977; Olson, 1965).
The second suite of factors that is associated with successful contentious politics includes
aspects of the social and institutional framework that facilitate and constrain collective action.
The political opportunity structures stream in the literature on protest emphasizes the role of
state institutions in structuring and channeling opportunities for people with grievances to come
together to press leaders to address their concerns, as well as social and institutional obstacles to
collective action (e.g. Kitschelt, 1986; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, 2001; Tarrow, 2011).
Though our understanding of protest and contentious politics has improved immeasurably
since Gurrs seminal book, more recent scholars have by and large retained his central insight
that citizens rebel following a change in the relationship between what they expect and what they
experience. Writing from a political opportunities structure perspective, Sidney Tarrow also

11

argues that popular mobilization tends to result from a change that alters the structure of
opportunities and constraints facing actors. Summarizing a large body of work on the topic, he
maintains that People engage in contentious politics when patterns of political opportunities and
constraints change [] Contentious politics is produced when threats are experienced and
opportunities are present (Tarrow, 2011; chap 1).
The argument proposed here is that in the context of manipulated elections, the relevant
change which generates both a threat and an opportunity is a deterioration in the quality of
elections, which provides the necessary coordinating device that steady-state electoral
manipulation often fails to deliver. This insight yields the hypothesis that electoral protest is
most likely to take place where there has been a recent increase in electoral malpractice.
At first glance this claim might seem counterintuitive. Electoral institutions are typically
relatively technical and remote from most peoples immediate concerns. In order to explain the
formation of coalitions for electoral reform, we thus need to explain not only how groups
manage successfully to form, but why the select electoral irregularities as their major demand (or
one of their major demands) rather than other grievances.
One aspect of the answer offered here is that electoral malpractice provides an incentive
for oppositions to come together around a common demand and to select electoral reforms as one
of their main aims. When electoral authoritarian regimes are already weakened as they often
are when they undertake enhanced electoral malpractice they are particularly vulnerable to
threats such as those posed by popular uprisings (Bunce and Wolchik, 2009; McFaul, 2005).
Moreover, mass mobilization behind protest movements can further weaken regimes internally,
as they may exacerbate divisions and encourage defections (Schedler, 2013: 354-5). This creates
opportunities for mobilization.

12

The demand for fair electoral institutions is a demand that transcends ideological
positions; in this sense, it is a demand around which diverse groups can work together without
selling out or compromising their ideological principles. As several scholars have pointed out,
elections are frequently critical political junctures, electoral fraud can serve as a focal point,
providing a co-ordination mechanism to opposition elites (Bunce and Wolchik, 2009; Thompson
and Kuntz, 2006; 2009; Tucker, 2007). In Joshua Tuckers words When a regime commits
electoral fraud, an individuals calculus regarding whether to participate in a protest against the
regime can be changed significantly (Tucker, 2007: 353), and this helps to solve the collective
action problem normally faced by those with grievances against an electoral authoritarian
regime. Protest also serves to communicate information to both regime elites and members of
the public that the regime is weak and therefore vulnerable to downfall, which can further fuel
protests (Bunce and Wolchik, 2009; Howard and Roessler, 2006: 372; Schedler, 2013; Tucker,
2007).
These studies suggest that the presence of electoral abuse ought to trigger protest. Yet as
the data presented above suggest, protests are rare, even in counties with poor-quality elections.
High but stable levels of electoral malpractice can clearly persist for long periods without
bringing about significant protest movements. The key to unravelling this puzzle is that although
the above-cited accounts delineate how mobilizational opportunities are created by electoral
malpractice, they do not adequately explain why these opportunities should be exploited
following one manipulated election but not another. The answer proposed here is that in addition
to the opportunity represented by electoral malpractice itself, a threat to electoral rights serves to
galvanize groups into action by leading to a heightened sense of perceived political deprivation.
In other words, when there is an increase in abuse, citizens are more likely to be available for

13

mobilization as they are more likely to perceive that they have lost their rights, and it is this
concurrently-shared grievance which provides the coordinating device which enables citizens to
overcome collective action challenges.4

III Empirical Evidence

The hypothesis set out above is tested on the protest indicator from the NELDA dataset together
with a summary indicator of electoral malpractice from the Index of Electoral Malpractice (IEM)
dataset (Birch, 2011), a dataset of 155 elections held in 61 states in four regions of the world
between 1995 and 2007: Central Europe, the Former Soviet Union, Latin America and SubSaharan Africa.
The measure employed for a decline in election quality is a dummy variable representing
an increase of at least two points on the five-point IEM scale in the overall electoral quality
variable (Q15) in this dataset. (Given that higher scores on this variable are associated with
greater electoral malpractice, an increase represents a decline in electoral integrity.)
In addition to changes in electoral integrity, the above discussion suggests that a number
of other variables will be associated with the occurrence of post-electoral protests. Resource
variables include: level of scoio-economic development (per capita GDP), level of urbanization

Meirowitz and Tucker (2013) note, however, that having successfully turned an authoritarian

leader out of office via protests, mass public may be less willing to undertake large-scale protests
in the same context a second time, as their post-reform experience may, if negative, have altered
their understanding of the entire population of politicians in their state.
14

and the number of telephones per 100,000 population.5 The opportunity variable designating
institutional openness is the extent to which civil rights are guaranteed. Ethnic fractionalization is
also included as a constraint (or negative opportunity), as it can be expected to divide groups
that might otherwise mobilize around common concerns. Finally, an additional factor relevant to
post-electoral protest is related to developments in the international arena which have
undoubtedly contributed to the trend observed: the end of the Cold War led to an increase in
pressure on states from the international community, which resulted in greater international
attention to elections and increased the legitimacy cost of manipulating electoral procedures
(Hyde, 2011; Kelly, 2012). Several measures of the international connectedness and dependence
of a state were included, including trade dependence, fuel exports, and Official Development
Assistance.6 It is expected that states which trade more and receive more aid should, all else
being equal, be more susceptible to international pressure in the wake of large-scale protest
against election fraud. This fact should provide an incentive for groups to mobilize protests, in

In theory it would have been desirable to include also internet access and newspaper readership,

but there was too much missing data on these variables for this to be viable. With regard to
internet access, it should also be noted that until the widespread ownership of smartphones,
internet usage was confined to a very small sector of the population of most of the countries
studied here.
6

The presence of international observers is another variable that is theoretically relevant in this

context. Unfortunately it was not possible to test this hypothesis on the data used here, as the
Index of Electoral Malpractice is based on the reports of international observers and thus
includes no variance on this variable.
15

the hope of attracting international pressure that might cause their government to undertake
reforms. The exception can be anticipated to be states that export large amounts of fuel, as global
dependence on fossil fuel should dampen the willingness of democratic states to condemn
elections in those from which they import oil, gas and other fuels.
Data to construct control variables described here are taken from a variety of sources; see
the Appendix for details of variable construction and data sources.
Table 1 presents a logistic regression model of the probability of there being a protest
following an election. As can be seen from this model, a decline in electoral integrity is
associated with a higher probability of protest, even controlling for other factors.
Table 1 about here
In fact, few of the controls are significant, once the decline in election quality is included in the
model. Ethnic fractionalization is, as expected, associated with a low probability of protest,
whereas trade dependence increase the likelihood of protest, a relationship also predicted. The
positive coefficient on the variable designating fuel exports is unexpected; the reasons for this
are not entirely clear, but it seems that closer ties with the outside world make it more likely that
protests will occur.
As will be noted from the N figure at the base of Table 1, missing data has reduced the
number of cases included in this model considerably. The next stage in the development of this
paper is to construct a larger database of electoral integrity/malpractice, covering a wider range
of states and a longer time period, in order to gain superior analytic leverage and to provide a
more robust test of the hypotheses developed here.

IV Discussion and Conclusion

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A number of scholars have noted that protest activity has been the principal motor of electoral
reform in many states (Beissinger, 2007; Bunce and Wolchick, 2009; 2010; 2011; Norris, 2012;
Schedler, 2013; Thompson and Kuntz, 2004; 2006; Tucker, 2007). The way in which popular
protests against electoral fraud play out has also been the subject of several macro-level analyses
(Bunce and Wolchik, 2011; Case, 2006; Cox, 2009; Lehoucq, 1995; Magaloni, 2006; 2010;
Schedler, 2002b; 2013; Thompson and Kuntz, 2006).
Faced with large-scale protest movements, elites in weakened electoral authoritarian
regimes have the choice of either engaging in proactive reforms in the hopes of retaining power
democratically, or further intensifying fraud and repressive measures in the hopes of holding
onto power through force and repression. Their decision is conditioned by a variety of factors
including the strength and cohesiveness of the opposition (Howard and Roessler, 2006; 2009;
Magaloni, 2010; Schedler, 2013), the strength of state and party institutions (Levitsky and Way,
2010), and relations with democratic neighbours and influential international actors (Beaulieu
and Hyde, 2009; Donno, 2013a; Hyde, 2011; Kelley, 2012; Levitsky and Way, 2010).
Where formal institutions are weak and power is personalized, elections are more likely
to be a high-stakes affairs in which losers run a considerable risk to personal security, loss of
wealth and status and permanent exclusion from the political system. Under these conditions, it
leaders frequently seek to retain their positions by repressing opposition elites and continuing to
undertake electoral fraud and malpractice. In cases where large-scale electoral malpractice has
been the norm for a considerable time and elites are not particularly weak, they are often able to
repress calls for reform (as in Russia 2012 or Iran 2009). Under these circumstances they are
often able to remain in power, despite widespread unrest. At this point they once again have the
option of engaging in proactive reforms, as happened in Moldova in 2009 following the

17

Communists successful repression of an attempted electoral revolution (Pop-Eleches and

Robertson, 2010), though they are generally unlikely to do so assuming the underlying strength
of their institutions has not changed. If, on the other hand, key elite actors such as the military
desert the elites, as happened in The Philippines in 1986, Serbia in 2000, Georgia 2003 or
Ukraine 2004, then the elite will be forced to cede to popular demands and to undertake reforms.
Following a mass protest, regime elites then have the choice of either engaging in
proactive reforms in the hopes of retaining power democratically, or further intensifying fraud
and repressive measures in the aim of maintaining power through force. Their decision, and the
ultimate outcome of the regime-opposition confrontation, is conditioned by a variety of factors
that have been examined elsewhere (Cox, 2009; Eisenstadt, 2004; Donno, 2013a; 2013b;
Lehoucq, 1995; Levitsky and Way, 2010; Magaloni, 2006; 2010; Howard and Roessler, 2006;
2009; Schedler, 2002b; 2013; Svolik and Chernyk, 2012; Thompson and Kuntz, 2006; 2009),
including incumbent turnover, opposition cohesion and organisational capacity, and state
institutional strength.
I would not of course claim that that this process outlined here is the sole route to
integrity-enhancing reforms, as other factors such as proximity to other democratizing or
democratic regimes (linkage in Levitsky and Ways formulation) can also account for
improvements in electoral quality even in the absence of protests sparked by fraud. Likewise,
there are cases, such as Ghana, where elections exhibit gradual improvements over time without
significant backsliding (Lindberg, 2009a: 14-15). However, the route outlined here appears to be
becoming increasingly common. This means that elections often have to get worse before they
get better.

18

The argument sketched in this paper cuts across the recent debates as to whether elections
are functional or detrimental to electoral authoritarian regimes (Blaydes, 2011; Howard and
Roessler, 2006; 2009; Lindberg, 2006; 2009a; 2009b; Lust-Okar, 2009; Pop-Eleches and
Robertson, 2010; Schedler, 2013; Teorell and Hadenius, 2009). It could well be that elections
and electoral manipulation in particular are for a time functional in propping up authoritarian
regimes that would otherwise find it difficult to insulate themselves from the threats posed by
rival elites and discontented publics, but that ultimately worsening electoral manipulation
brought about by regime weakness sparks protest movements that undermine regime stability.
One of the implications of this argument is that the intensification of fraud may often be a
harbinger of impending improvement. If a deterioration in election quality is by no means a
sufficient condition for a popular uprising to bring about democratic change, it appears to be a
common condition. This finding is relevant for electoral assistance providers, in that it suggests
that in contexts where electoral integrity worsens over a series of elections, the focus of electoral
assistance may be most profitably targeted at the domestic proponents of electoral reform,
including domestic observer groups and opposition actors.
Further research could usefully examine in greater detail the dynamics of protest as well
as conditions under which protests against electoral malpractice lead to lasting improvements in
electoral quality. This is an area in which academic research can yield considerable insights that
are of practical relevance, and it is a field in which much work remains to be done.

19

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Appendix: Data Sources and Variable Construction

Civil Rights: Freedom House Political Rights and Civil Liberties scale; this is a seven-point scale
that is inverted here such that a higher score represents greater civil rights. Source:
www.freedomhouse. org.
Corruption: Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. This index ranges from 0
(most corrupt) to 10 (least corrupt). The data were inverted for use in the models such
that a higher score is associated with greater corruption. Where data were missing, the
nearest datapoint in time was used, as this is generally recognized to be a slow-changing
variable. Source: www.transparency.org.
Ethnic fractionalization: This measure of ethnic fractionalization varies from 0 to 1. Source:
Alesina et al, 2003.
Fuel exports as a proportion of merchandise exports. Following Ross (2001), fuel exports for
Singapore and Trinidad are adjusted to take into consideration that these states are
primarily transit states, not fuel producers. The fuel export values for these states are set
at 0.01. Where data were missing, the nearest datapoint in time was used, as this is
generally recognized to be a slow-changing variable. Source: World Bank Development
Indicators at http://data.worldbank.org/indicator.
International democracy assistance: Ofcial Development Assistance for the category of
Government and civil society general. Figures are in millions of US dollars. Source:
OECD Creditor Reporting System data at http://stats.oecd.org.
Socio-economic development: UNDP Human Development Index. Source: United Nations
Development Program, http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi.

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Trade dependence: The combined value of exports plus imports as a share of GDP. Where data
were missing, the nearest datapoint in time was used, as this is generally recognized to be
a slow-changing variable. Source: World Bank Development Indicators at
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator.
Telephones per capita: This indicator is taken from Bankss Cross-National Time Series Dataset:
the measure used is phones6: all telephones including cellular per capita. Figures are per
100,000 population. Where data were missing, figures were taken from the nearest year,
provided that year was not more than two years before or after the year in question.
Source: Cross-National Time Series Data Archive,
http://www.databanksinternational.com/.
Urbanization: Percent urban population. Source: World Bank Development Indicators at
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator.

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Table 1: Logistic Regression Model of Post-election Protest

Variable

Coefficient (standard error)

Decline in election quality since previous

election

.2.641** (1.283)

Resources:
GDP per capita at ppp (logged)
Urbanization
Telephones per 100,000

-.431 (934)
.048 (.039)
.000 (.000)

Opportunities and constraints:

Freedom House Civil Liberties
Ethnic fractionalization

-.328 (.407)
-4.701* (2.613)

International dependence
Trade dependence
Fuel exports (as a % of exports)
Official Development Assistance

.030** (.014)
.032* (.017)
.003
(.008)

Constant

.274

Nagelkerke R2
N

(6.921)
.358
56

Note: * = p < .10; ** = p < .05; *** = p < .01; **** = p < .001

29

Figure 1: Global trend in post-electoral protests 1945-2011

Source: Calculated from Variable 29 of the National Elections Across Democracies and
Autocracies dataset (v3), http://hyde.research.yale.edu/gfnelda/.

30