The Comparative Study of Electoral Governance—Introduction
| Author | Andreas Schedler,Shaheen Mozaffar |
| Published date | 01 January 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512102023001001 |
| Date | 01 January 2002 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The Comparative Study of Electoral
Governance—Introduction
SHAHEEN MOZAFFAR AND ANDREAS SCHEDLER
ABSTRACT. Electoral governance is a crucial variable in securing the
credibility of elections in emerging democracies, but remains largely
ignored in the comparative study of democratization. This article
develops some basic analytical tools to advance comparative analysis and
understanding of this neglected topic. It conceptualizes electoral
governance as a set of related activities that involves rule making, rule
application, and rule adjudication. It identifies the provision of
procedural certainty to secure the substantive uncertainty of democratic
elections as the principal task of electoral governance. It argues that
electoral governance, while socially and institutionally embedded,
matters most during the indeterminate conditions that typically attend
democratization. Finally, it outlines a research agenda that covers the
comparative study of the structures as well as the processes of electoral
governance.
Keywords: Democracy • Democratization • Elections • Electoral govern-
ance • Electoral institutions
The unprecedented 2000 US presidential election afforded us an unforeseen
natural experiment to reinforce the central message of this thematic issue: Electoral
governance matters. Events and controversies surrounding the election in Florida
underscored the importance but also illustrated the paradox of electoral
governance in securing credible democratic elections. Both scholarly recognition
and systematic analysis of the role of electoral governance in securing credible
elections are hindered by the fact that elections in established democracies tend
largely to be routine events that produce results outside the unacknowledged
“margin of error” that exists in all democratic elections. Because democratic
elections entail the largest peacetime mobilization of the national population in a
short time span and require the coordination of hundreds of individuals engaged
in hundreds of different activities, they are almost always infected with errors
International Political Science Review (2002), Vol 23, No. 1, 5–27
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stemming from, among other things, defective ballots, incomplete and inaccurate
voter rolls, exclusion of registered voters, inaccuracies in counting, tabulating and
recording votes, and human mistakes. These inaccuracies define the margin of
error in all elections. There is, in other words, no such thing as a perfect
democratic election. But to the extent that these errors are random and do not ex
ante determine the results, electoral credibility obtains. Credible electoral routines
thus tend to obscure the importance of electoral governance in securing them. It
is only when “elections go bad” (Issacharoff, Karlan, and Pildes, 2001) that
electoral governance attracts critical scrutiny.
In established democracies, elections go bad not because they embody
deficiencies, mistakes and inaccuracies. They go bad when these otherwise
random problems, usually caused by the sheer magnitude of coordinating
hundreds of discrete tasks to create a stable framework for electoral competition,
systematically affect the outcome of that competition. And these problems
systematically affect the electoral outcome when that outcome itself falls within the
margin of error defined by them. In Florida, a statistical dead heat produced by
the closest presidential race in over a century sharply accentuated the otherwise
negligible effects of routine electoral errors on the final result. It highlighted
problems widely known to exist but too innocuous to worry about and too
expensive to correct. Helped by “real time” television coverage, the virtual tie
precipitated a penetrating public scrutiny of the overall structure and processes of
electoral governance in the state and the country. Paradoxically, then, electoral
governance attracts serious attention not when it routinely produces good
elections but when it occasionally produces bad ones.
It is this paradox that has obscured the empirical relevance and analytical
significance of electoral governance. As far as “people take for granted the
administrative dimension of elections” (Pastor, 1999a: 76) they tend to overlook
the critical role of electoral governance in securing the credibility and continued
legitimacy of democratic elections. This role is obviously important, although not
well examined nor understood, in established democracies. But it has a special
resonance in emerging democracies, where deliberate electoral manipulation and
systematic fraud by recalcitrant authoritarian rulers unwilling to give up power
have often blocked, derailed or truncated transitions to democracy. Growing, but
as yet unsystematic evidence, alongside the considerable amount of practical
expertise accumulated by international donors, indicates that ineffective electoral
governance is an important cause of many flawed elections witnessed in
transitional regimes over the past three decades. Effective electoral governance
alone does not guarantee good elections, of course, because a complex variety of
social, economic and political variables affect the process, integrity, and outcome
of democratic elections. But good elections are impossible without effective
electoral governance.
Since the late 1980s, an impressive network has emerged of national and
international organizations active in election monitoring and democracy
assistance.1But students of democratic politics have been slow to recognize the
practical relevance and analytical import of the new field. Electoral governance
remains a “neglected variable” in the study of political democratization (Elklit and
Reynolds, 2000; Pastor, 1999b). This neglect stems in part from the normative
orientation of discussions that have focused on developing evaluative criteria to
assess deviations from preconceived (and often somewhat idealized) notions of
democratic progress. While we acknowledge the importance of normative
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