Electoral Systems and Electoral Misconduct

Abstract

This article is a cross-national study of the impact of electoral system design on electoral misconduct. It argues that elections held in single-member districts (SMD) under plurality and majority rule are more likely to be the object of malpractice than those run under proportional representation (PR). Two reasons are advanced in support of this argument: Candidates in SMD systems have more to gain from individual efforts to manipulate elections than is the case for candidates in PR contests; and malfeasance is more efficient under SMD rules, in that the number of votes that must be altered to change the outcome is typically smaller than it is under PR. This hypothesis is tested and confirmed on a new data set of electoral manipulation in 24 postcommunist countries between 1995 and 2004. The proportion of seats elected in SMDs is found to be positively associated with levels of electoral misconduct, controlling for a variety of contextual factors.

Deterring or Displacing Electoral Irregularities? Spillover Effects of Observers in a Randomized Field Experiment in Ghana

“…Our experimental study reinforces Birch (2007)'s concerns about the robustness of findings from large-n empirical studies that measure fraud using observer reports. These include most obviously studies on the causes and consequences of electoral fraud, but also those on the relationship between election quality and democratic development (Lindberg 2006).…”

“…For both historical and contemporary cases, the question of how informal practices of ballot stuffing, registration fraud, and other electoral malpractices are eliminated is now central to the study of democratization (Ziblatt 2006), which had earlier focused on changes to formal rules like the extension of the suffrage or the development of responsible and limited government. An emerging body of scholarship on democratization and new democracies argues that the extent of electoral fraud is affected by political competition (Lehoucq 2003;Simpser 2010), electoral rules (Birch 2007;Lehoucq and Molina 2002), socioeconomic inequality (Ziblatt 2009), the quality of the electoral management body that organizes and conducts the elections (Elklit 1999;Elklit and Reynolds 2002;Hartlyn, McCoy, and Mustillo 2008;Pastor 1999), and scrutiny by international election monitors (Hyde 2007;Kelley 2012).…”

“…Consequently, current measures used in crossnational studies may underestimate the extent of electoral fraud in new democracies, including those that appear to have fairly clean elections. This underlies the need for substantial caution about the robustness of empirical findings in this emerging large-n literature (Birch 2007).…”

“…Rather than deterring irregularities entirely, observers displace a substantial portion of irregularities to nearby unobserved registration centers in a pattern consistent with communication among political party agents. The effects of these observers and the estimated extent of irregularities are substantial, buttressing Birch's (2007) concerns.…”

“…Our study is sited in Ghana in sub-Saharan Africa because it shares with many other partial democracies political and institutional characteristics that are expected to affect politicians' incentives to engage in electoral malpractices (Birch 2007;Hartlyn, McCoy, and Mustillo 2008). 1 It has a majoritarian electoral system and an electoral commission that is officially independent but underresourced.…”