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Who's There? Election Observer Identity and the Local Credibility of Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2018

Sarah Sunn Bush  and
Lauren Prather
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Abstract

Prior research has sought to understand the rise of election observers and their consequences for outcomes such as fraud, protest, and violence. These studies are important but they overlook a significant individual-level dynamic that observers themselves care about: the effect that election observers have on local attitudes about elections. We argue that the activities of election observers can enhance elections' local credibility, but only when locals perceive observers as being both capable of detecting fraud and unbiased in that pursuit. Not all observer groups are seen as equally capable and unbiased. Evidence from a large-scale, nationally representative experiment in Tunisia supports the argument. A key finding is that observers from the Arab League—an organization criticized internationally for low-quality election observation—enhanced credibility the most because they were perceived locally as both relatively capable and unbiased.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Organization , Volume 72 , Issue 3 , Summer 2018 , pp. 659 - 692
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 2018 

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