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Does electoral fraud stabilize authoritarian rule or undermine it? The answer to this question rests in part on how voters evaluate regime candidates who engage in fraud. Using a survey experiment conducted after the 2016 elections in Russia, the authors find that voters withdraw their support from ruling party candidates who commit electoral fraud. This effect is especially large among strong supporters of the regime. Core regime supporters are more likely to have ex ante beliefs that elections are free and fair. Revealing that fraud has occurred significantly reduces their propensity to support the regime. The authors’ findings illustrate that fraud is costly for autocrats not just because it may ignite protest, but also because it can undermine the regime’s core base of electoral support. Because many of its strongest supporters expect free and fair elections, the regime has strong incentives to conceal or otherwise limit its use of electoral fraud.

This article develops a theory to account for the variation in electoral systems in electoral authoritarian regimes. We argue that resource-rich dictators are incentivized to employ proportional representation systems to alleviate the threat from the masses and pre-empt the emergence of new opposition, while resource-poor dictators tend to choose majoritarian systems to co-opt ruling elites in the legislature. Using cross-national data on electoral authoritarian regimes, we find strong empirical evidence supporting our theory. We also explicitly illustrate the causal links between natural resources and electoral systems with additional statistical analyses and comparative case studies on Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

This article investigates the relationship between international election observation, election fraud, and post-election violence. While international electoral missions could in principle mitigate the potential for violence by deterring election fraud, the ability of international observers to detect manipulation may in fact induce violent uprisings. Serious irregularities documented by international observers provide credible information on election quality, which draws attention to election outcomes and alleviates coordination problems faced by opposition parties and society. When elections are manipulated to deny citizens an opportunity for peaceful contestation and international observers publicize such manipulation, violent interactions between incumbents, opposition parties, and citizens can ensue. Consequently, the author expects that fraudulent elections monitored by international organizations will have an increased potential for subsequent violence. This expectation is evaluated empirically in an analysis of postelection conflict events for African elections in the 1997-2009 period. Using original data on electoral manipulation and reputable international election observation missions, findings show that the presence of election fraud and international observers increases the likelihood of post-election violence. Matching methods are employed to account for the possibility that international observers' decisions to monitor elections are endogenous to the occurrence of violence in the electoral process. Results for matched samples confirm the findings in the unmatched sample. A variety of robustness tests show that the results are not influenced by the operationalization of independent variables and influential observations.

Elections held outside of advanced, industrialized democracies can turn violent because elites use coercion to demobilize political opponents. The literature has established that closely contested elections are associated with more violence. I depart from this emphasis on competitiveness by highlighting how institutional biases in electoral systems, in particular uneven apportionment, affect incentives for violence. Malapportionment refers to a discrepancy between the share of legislative seats and the share of population, violating the ‘one person, one vote’ principle. Drawing on recent work on malapportionment establishing that overrepresented districts are targeted with clientelist strategies, are more homogenous, and are biased in favor of district-level incumbent parties, I argue that overrepresented districts present fewer incentives for using violence. In contrast, elites in well-apportioned or underrepresented districts exert less control over electoral outcomes because such districts have more heterogenous voter preferences, raising incumbent and opposition demands to employ violence. I examine the effects of malapportionment on violence using constituency-level elections data and new, disaggregated, and geocoded event data on the incidence of election violence in India. Results from six parliamentary elections from 1991 to 2009 show that electoral violence is less prevalent in overrepresented constituencies, and that violence increases in equally apportioned and moderately underrepresented districts. The analysis establishes additional observable implications of the argument for district voter homogeneity and incumbent victory, accounts for confounders such as urbanization and state-level partisanship, and validates measures of election violence. The findings illustrate that institutional biases shape incentives for electoral violence.

This article presents a qualitative empirical study of elite collusion and its influence on village elections and rural land development in China. Drawing on ethnographic data collected from two Chinese villages, it investigates how village cadres collude with other rural elites, using bribery, gift-giving and lavish banquets, to establish reciprocal ties with township officials and other public officials. Meanwhile, the officials make use of formal organizations to corruptly obtain profits and form alliances with village elites. The article examines how rural elites, especially village cadres, use this collusion to profit from the misuse of villagers’ collectively owned assets, the manipulation of village elections and the suppression of anti-corruption protests. It also offers new descriptive evidence of how recent reforms designed to strengthen the Party's overall leadership in rural governance may have actually facilitated elite capture and grassroots corruption.

After the Cold War, election monitoring activities increased significantly, and research on the topic has risen sharply in the last ten years. These are valuable contributions, but we believe one point requires further consideration: empirically clarifying how monitoring has changed over time. This is because fraudsters have begun to shift election manipulation from the day of the election to other times in order to adapt to election monitoring. If fraudsters have evolved over time, have monitors kept pace with this evolution? Employing an original dataset of election monitoring reports published by major monitoring organizations, this study performs large-scale text analysis of these reports to show that the criteria used by monitoring teams have indeed changed over time. Specifically, although election monitoring groups have been criticized for their bias in emphasizing manipulation on election day more than other factors, we demonstrate that such bias has declined over time.

This study delves into the dynamic interplay between traditional African leadership paradigms and imposed democratic systems, with a focus on the extended tenures of Robert Mugabe, Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame. Anchored in post-colonial theory, political culture theory and leadership theory, it elucidates the cultural underpinnings that contribute to leaders’ reluctance to cede power and their subsequent impact on democratic governance. Employing a qualitative methodology with in-depth case studies, the study reveals a profound conflict between entrenched traditional norms and modern democratic ideals. The findings underscore the persistent influence of traditional leadership practices characterised by authoritarianism and electoral manipulation. This study situates these findings within the broader legacy of colonialism and the ongoing struggle for democratic consolidation, offering a nuanced understanding of the cultural dimensions of political leadership in Africa. The study proposes directions for future research and policy interventions aimed at enhancing political stability and democratic governance across the continent.

Debates surrounding electoral challenges in Indonesia often focus on vote buying, the entrenchment of political dynasties and the misuse of state resources. However, the strategic deployment of unelected interim local government leaders has received comparatively little scholarly attention. This article addresses that gap by offering a new perspective on how the state can shape electoral outcomes through legal but politically motivated appointments. Focusing on the 2024 presidential elections, it argues that the appointment of interim leaders ahead of the polls was politically driven, thereby casting doubt on the central government's justification that the policy aimed merely to enhance electoral efficiency. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders at both central and local levels, along with content analysis, the article provides a detailed examination of how former president Joko Widodo's administration utilized the interim leadership policy as a means of extending political influence. This form of strategic electoral manipulation reflects broader patterns of clientelism and signals a growing attempt to test the limits of democratic norms and institutions. As such, the article contributes to the wider discourse on electoral manipulation and democratic backsliding within formally democratic regimes.

Does electoral manipulation reduce voter turnout? The question is central to the study of political behavior in many electoral systems and to current debates on electoral reform. Nevertheless, existing evidence suggests contradictory answers. This article clarifies the theoretical relationship between electoral manipulation and turnout by drawing some simple conceptual distinctions and presents new empirical evidence from Mexico. The deep electoral reforms in 1990s Mexico provide a hitherto-unexploited opportunity to estimate the effect of electoral manipulation on turnout. The empirical strategy makes use of variation over time and across the states of Mexico in turnout and in electoral manipulation. The analysis finds that electoral manipulation under the PRI discouraged citizens from voting. Conceptually, the article shows that true and reported turnout need not move in the same direction, nor respond in the same way to electoral manipulation.

Political machines use state resources to win elections in many developing democracies and electoral autocracies. Recent research has noted that the coordination of machine politics can be much more complex and problem-prone than previously thought. Yet, the role that the subnational political context plays in solving these coordination problems has largely been neglected in the comparative literature. This article seeks to fill this gap and suggests that control over the local administration is an important variable that shapes the effectiveness of authoritarian machine politics. We exploit the great institutional and political variation within one of the most prominent electoral authoritarian regimes of today, the Russian Federation, to test the empirical implications of the theory with detailed local level electoral and socio-economic data as well as multilevel regression models. The empirical results highlight the importance of subnational political structures in supporting electoral authoritarian regimes.