Electoral Compliance - A New Framework for Analysis

• In Event: Elections in Autocracies and Weak Democracies

Abstract

Compliance with electoral results is critical for democracy. Previous research studied electoral compliance using a dichotomous variable on incidents of post-election protests. However, scholars, donors and policy-makers are interested in more then just whether a post-election took place. More specifically, we are interested in three main questions: Which political parties refused to comply with electoral outcomes? What particular actions did they take to signify their rejection and why? Yet, due to lack of data, these questions remain unanswered. In this paper, I introduce the Electoral Compliance and Rejection (ECR) Data Collection Project, which codes data on electoral rejection in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Africa. ECR uses the political party as the unit of analysis. I first discuss the main strategies that political parties can use to reject electoral outcomes. Next, I present the trends in electoral compliance around the world in the last 25 years. I conclude with an empirical analysis that investigates the effects of election-level and party-level characteristics on post-election disputes.

Author

• Svitlana Chernykh, Australian National University