Advancing Electoral Integrity

Recent decades have seen growing concern about problems of electoral integrity. The most overt malpractices used by rulers include imprisoning dissidents, harassing adversaries, coercing voters, vote-rigging counts, and even blatant disregard for the popular vote. Serious violations of human rights, undermining electoral credibility, are widely condemned by domestic observers and the international community. Recent protests about integrity have mobilized in countries as diverse as Russia, Mexico, and Egypt. Elsewhere minor irregularities are common, exemplified by inaccurate voter registers, maladministration of polling facilities, lack of security in absentee ballots, pro-government media bias, ballot miscounts, and gerrymandering. Long-standing democracies are far from immune to these ills; past problems include the notorious hanging chads in Florida in 2000 and more recent accusations of voter fraud and voter suppression during the Obama-Romney contest. In response to these developments, there have been growing attempts to analyze flaws in electoral integrity using systematic data from cross-national time-series, forensic analysis, field experiments, case studies, and new instruments monitoring mass and elite perceptions of malpractices. This volume collects essays from international experts who evaluate the robustness, conceptual validity, and reliability of the growing body of evidence. The essays compare alternative approaches and apply these methods to evaluate the quality of elections in several areas, including in the United States, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.

About the Author :
Pippa Norris is McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Harvard University. Richard W. Frank is Research Associate at the University of Sydney. Ferran Martinez i Coma is Research Associate at the University of Sydney.

Review :
"The strength of this volume is its inclusion of both practitioners and scholars and its connection to the Electoral Integrity Index, a real world effort to improve how we think about and assess election quality and - ultimately - political legitimacy. It provides an invaluable set of perspectives for students, scholars and policy makers alike who want to think about what can be done to improve elections around the world." --Judith G. Kelley, Kevin D. Gorter Professor of Public Policy and Political Science, Duke University "With the expansion of democracy around the world, the quality and fairness of elections has come under intense scrutiny. This timely volume brings together an impressive list of international experts on electoral integrity. The results will be of interest to scholars concerned about the conduct and management of elections around the world." --Ian McAllister, Professor of Political Science, Australian National University "Advancing Electoral Integrity combines real-world and scholarly expertise to advance debates on the quality of elections, democracy, and how we can reform existing institutions to improve electoral integrity around the world." --Susan Hyde, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Yale University "Advancing Electoral Integrity makes a vital contribution to the study of election quality. The volume provides an impressive tour d'horizon of this exciting new subfield, drawing together work by a variety of scholars working in different subfields as well as practitioners from outside academia. It is a must-read book for all who seek to have a full understanding of how elections work in the contemporary world." --Sarah Birch, Chair of Comparative Politics, University of Glasgow