From Monitoring to Meddling: How Foreign Actors Shape Local Trust in Elections

• In Event: Meddling in Elections

Abstract

Despite the outrage surrounding Russian interference in U.S. elections, foreign electoral interventions are common and widespread. They range from democracy promoting interventions that attempt to level the electoral playing field to partisan interventions that seek to tilt the playing field in favor of a preferred candidate. Today, democracy-promoting international election observers monitor more than 80 percent of elections. And, great powers such as the United States and Russia have intervened in numerous elections since World War II, often doing so in ways that successfully swing elections for domestic allies. Although scholars have examined the effects of these interventions on outcomes such as electoral fraud and the vote count, a critical outcome has been overlooked: individual trust in elections. Likewise, research on trust in elections has focused on domestic political explanations, ignoring the potential for foreign actors to affect electoral trust.

This project investigates whether foreign interference helps or harms citizens’ trust in their elections. The work delves deep into the psychology of citizens to theorize the conditions under which these interventions promote or undermine trust and democracy. It combines evidence from new and original surveys in three countries: Georgia, Tunisia, and the United States. These countries have all experienced foreign influence around their elections, and the cases allow us to explore how the project’s arguments apply in countries at different levels of democracy. Democracy is long-standing in the United States, new in Tunisia, and only partially present in Georgia. In each case, we conducted surveys around multiple elections, embedding experimental components designed to precisely identify the effects of foreign actors on political attitudes and behaviors.

Authors

• Sarah S. Bush, Yale University

• Lauren Prather, University of California, San Diego