Mozaffar and Schedler 2002

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International Political Science Review

DOI: 10.1177/0192512102023001001 2002; 23; 5 International Political Science Review

Shaheen Mozaffar and Andreas Schedler The Comparative Study of Electoral Governance—Introduction

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The Comparative Study of Electoral Governance—Introduction

SHAHEEN MOZAFFAR AND ANDREAS SCHEDLER

ABSTRACT. Electoral governance is a crucial variable in securing thecredibility of elections in emerging democracies, but remains largelyignored in the comparative study of democratization. This articledevelops some basic analytical tools to advance comparative analysis andunderstanding of this neglected topic. It conceptualizes electoralgovernance as a set of related activities that involves rule making, ruleapplication, and rule adjudication. It identifies the provision ofprocedural certainty to secure the substantive uncertainty of democraticelections as the principal task of electoral governance. It argues thatelectoral governance, while socially and institutionally embedded,matters most during the indeterminate conditions that typically attenddemocratization. Finally, it outlines a research agenda that covers thecomparative study of the structures as well as the processes of electoralgovernance.

Keywords: Democracy • Democratization • Elections • Electoral govern-ance • Electoral institutions

The unprecedented 2000 US presidential election afforded us an unforeseennatural experiment to reinforce the central message of this thematic issue: Electoralgovernance matters. Events and controversies surrounding the election in Floridaunderscored the importance but also illustrated the paradox of electoralgovernance in securing credible democratic elections. Both scholarly recognitionand systematic analysis of the role of electoral governance in securing credibleelections are hindered by the fact that elections in established democracies tendlargely to be routine events that produce results outside the unacknowledged“margin of error” that exists in all democratic elections. Because democraticelections entail the largest peacetime mobilization of the national population in ashort time span and require the coordination of hundreds of individuals engagedin 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 inaccuratevoter rolls, exclusion of registered voters, inaccuracies in counting, tabulating andrecording votes, and human mistakes. These inaccuracies define the margin oferror in all elections. There is, in other words, no such thing as a perfectdemocratic election. But to the extent that these errors are random and do not exante determine the results, electoral credibility obtains. Credible electoral routinesthus tend to obscure the importance of electoral governance in securing them. Itis only when “elections go bad” (Issacharoff, Karlan, and Pildes, 2001) thatelectoral governance attracts critical scrutiny.

In established democracies, elections go bad not because they embodydeficiencies, mistakes and inaccuracies. They go bad when these otherwiserandom problems, usually caused by the sheer magnitude of coordinatinghundreds of discrete tasks to create a stable framework for electoral competition,systematically affect the outcome of that competition. And these problemssystematically affect the electoral outcome when that outcome itself falls within themargin of error defined by them. In Florida, a statistical dead heat produced bythe closest presidential race in over a century sharply accentuated the otherwisenegligible effects of routine electoral errors on the final result. It highlightedproblems widely known to exist but too innocuous to worry about and tooexpensive to correct. Helped by “real time” television coverage, the virtual tieprecipitated a penetrating public scrutiny of the overall structure and processes ofelectoral governance in the state and the country. Paradoxically, then, electoralgovernance attracts serious attention not when it routinely produces goodelections but when it occasionally produces bad ones.

It is this paradox that has obscured the empirical relevance and analyticalsignificance of electoral governance. As far as “people take for granted theadministrative dimension of elections” (Pastor, 1999a: 76) they tend to overlookthe critical role of electoral governance in securing the credibility and continuedlegitimacy of democratic elections. This role is obviously important, although notwell examined nor understood, in established democracies. But it has a specialresonance in emerging democracies, where deliberate electoral manipulation andsystematic fraud by recalcitrant authoritarian rulers unwilling to give up powerhave often blocked, derailed or truncated transitions to democracy. Growing, butas yet unsystematic evidence, alongside the considerable amount of practicalexpertise accumulated by international donors, indicates that ineffective electoralgovernance is an important cause of many flawed elections witnessed intransitional regimes over the past three decades. Effective electoral governancealone does not guarantee good elections, of course, because a complex variety ofsocial, economic and political variables affect the process, integrity, and outcomeof democratic elections. But good elections are impossible without effectiveelectoral governance.

Since the late 1980s, an impressive network has emerged of national andinternational organizations active in election monitoring and democracyassistance.1 But students of democratic politics have been slow to recognize thepractical relevance and analytical import of the new field. Electoral governanceremains a “neglected variable” in the study of political democratization (Elklit andReynolds, 2000; Pastor, 1999b). This neglect stems in part from the normativeorientation of discussions that have focused on developing evaluative criteria toassess deviations from preconceived (and often somewhat idealized) notions ofdemocratic progress. While we acknowledge the importance of normative

6 International Political Science Review 23(1)



considerations, our goal in this Introduction is to stress the analytic significanceand utility of electoral governance in the study of political democratization.

Systematic examination of electoral governance requires attention to severalanalytical (conceptual, theoretical, and methodological) issues. The mainconceptual tasks involve specifying the meaning of electoral governance,conceptualizing its institutional location in the political system, anddisaggregating it into researchable procedural and structural variables.2 Thetheoretical core issues concern the origins, political logic, and causal implicationsof electoral governance. Finally, the central methodological challenge consists inelaborating viable strategies for studying electoral governance. While we do notpretend to resolve all these challenges in the remainder of this Introduction, we dowish to advance a good way in developing a substantive agenda as well as an analy-tical framework for conducting comparative research on electoral governance.

Levels of Electoral GovernanceElections involve more than voting. The formal act of casting a ballot is precededby electoral competition in which rules defining, among other things, theelectoral formula, district magnitudes, district boundaries, and assembly sizecoordinate the strategic choice of voters, parties, and candidates over votes andseats (Cox, 1997; Lijphart, 1994; Taagepera and Shugart, 1989). Electoralgovernance is the wider set of activities that creates and maintains the broadinstitutional framework in which voting and electoral competition take place. Itoperates on three levels: rule making, rule application, and rule adjudication.Rule making involves designing the basic rules of the electoral game; ruleapplication involves implementing these rules to organize the electoral game; ruleadjudication involves resolving disputes arising within the game (see Table 1).Above the first level, the “meta-game” of constitutional rule making defines whopossesses the authority for defining the rules of electoral governance. Indemocratic transitions, struggles for changing rules are often intertwined withstruggles for changing meta-rules. While acknowledging the foundational role ofconstitutional rules, we focus our attention here on the three lower levels.

First, at the level of rule making, electoral governance involves the design ofinstitutions that define the basic framework of democratic elections. Rules ofelectoral competition and rules of electoral organization configure thisframework. Students of electoral systems have focused almost exclusively on thepolitical consequences of the rules of electoral competition. The study of electoralgovernance looks at their political origins and covers a wider basket of electoralrules. Traditional electoral rules covering suffrage rights, rules of representation,assembly size, district magnitude, district boundaries, and electoral calendars formpart of the agenda. But the basic framework of democratic elections also includesadditional sets of rules that have been largely neglected in extant scholarship: theformal rules that govern voter, party, and candidate eligibility and registration;rules regulating election observation; laws and regulations that affect the resourceendowments of parties and candidates (their access to money and media); rulesprescribing the method of counting, tabulating, and reporting votes; and lawsestablishing the structure, jurisdiction, and operational framework of electionmanagement bodies and dispute settlement authorities.

Second, at the level of rule implementation, electoral governance coordinatesthe tasks of diverse personnel and organizes the execution of a complex array

MOZAFFAR/SCHEDLER: Introduction 7



of interdependent activities to establish the stable institutional basis for voting and electoral competition. Electoral governance as rule application evokes anidealized image of bureaucratic routine and mechanical execution of coherentsets of known and tested rules, an image erroneously conveyed by the familiarnotions of “electoral administration” and “electoral management.” Yet, intransitional regimes and new democracies, the complex task of organizingelectoral contests is much closer to the “diabolic” paradoxes of politics (Weber,1919) than to the tedium of bureaucratic routine. It involves pursuing andreconciling three “conflicting imperatives” (Gould, 1999): administrativeefficiency, political neutrality, and public accountability. These three goals are “interdependent but contradictory” (ibid.: 439). Electoral officials cannotneglect any one of them, nor can they maximize them all together. In the context of material scarcity and political distrust that is common to manyemerging democracies, electoral credibility can obtain when electoral governancesucceeds in meeting the three challenges and balancing the trade-offs theyinvolve.3


TABLE 1. The Three Levels of Electoral Governance.

Levels Elements

1. Rule MakingChoosing and defining the basic rules of

the electoral game.

(a) Rules of Electoral Competition: – Formula– District magnitude– District boundaries– Assembly size– Electoral time table– Franchise

(b) Rules of Electoral Governance: – Voter registration– Party and candidate registration– Campaign financing and regulation– Election observation– Ballot design– Polling stations– Voting, counting, and tabulating– Election management bodies– Dispute settlement authorities

2. Rule ApplicationOrganizing the electoral game. – Registration of voters, candidates, parties

– Registration of election observers– Voter education– Electoral organization– Voting, counting, and reporting

3. Rule AdjudicationCertifying election results and resolving – Admission of complaints

disputes. – Processing of cases– Publication and implementation of rulings



The challenge of administrative efficiency: It is precisely at the level of ruleapplication that electoral governance is most susceptible to errors, not onlybecause of the sheer magnitude and complexity of the tasks that need to beaccomplished but also because of the large number of people involved and theauthorized discretion they exercise in accomplishing their tasks. Elections involvethe largest peacetime mobilization of the national population. Their organizationand conduct therefore require complex logistical exercises usually under severetime constraints. To obtain a credible election process and unproblematic voting,these very complexities and constraints dictate a high level of central coordinationand strategic planning. Universal adult suffrage and equal participation dictateeasily accessible voting places, which requires locating them across the countryand staffing them with adequate and trained personnel possessing sufficientdevolved authority to manage local contingencies. In federal systems,administrative exigencies also require balancing central control with localautonomy. However, unrestrained local autonomy can engender such markedvariations in patterns of electoral governance as to diminish the credibility of theelection process.4 The inordinate complexity and interdependence of themultifaceted activities that comprise the election process also demand some formof project planning spelling out the mission of election management, clarifyingthe strategic objectives to be achieved, and specifying the mechanisms forachieving them in a timely fashion. Electoral governance as rule applicationconsists of innumerable technical activities whose efficient organization andexecution determine the credibility of elections. Inadequate attention tooperational details can seriously compromise that credibility. An emphasis onproject planning does not necessarily imply bureaucratic rigidity, however. Ratherit draws attention to the importance of utilizing lessons learned from previouselections to reduce the marginal cost of future elections.

The challenge of political neutrality: In transitional regimes, opposition partiesare deeply suspicious of electoral processes, and usually for good reasons.Authoritarian rulers seeking electoral legitimation typically attempt to manipulatethe structures and processes of election administration to secure favorableoutcomes (Schedler, this issue). Election authorities thus have to perform theirduties in a way that dissipates suspicions over their political neutrality. Putting itcolloquially, they have to show that they are more than just pliant puppets of theregime. The stringent norms of behavior specified in the code of conductformulated by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance(International IDEA) provide useful guidelines for election officials to maintainstrict neutrality.5

How successful electoral authorities are in depoliticizing the management ofelections depends in part on how successful they are in achieving administrativeefficiency. In the context of limited financial and human resources prevailing inmost emerging democracies, organizational excellence is difficult to achieve.Some irregularities are bound to happen. Yet opposition parties tend to readtechnical failures as indicators of fraud. The “intersection between politicalsuspicion and technical incapacity” (Pastor, 1998: 1) may spark ardent disputeswith a potential of derailing the whole process. Preventing technical problemsfrom contaminating an electoral process with corrosive suspicions is not an easyassignment, though. Deep-seated distrust often impedes pragmatic trade-offsbetween organizational efficiency and the establishment of institutionalsafeguards against fraud and manipulation. Yet, as the Florida controversy in the




2000 US presidential election indicates, even in democracies with extendedelectoral histories and well-established generalized norms of apoliticalbureaucracy, the presumption of administrative impartiality may be called intoquestion where the institutional design of electoral governance fails to separatethe exercise of public authority from political partisanship.

The challenge of public accountability: Electoral governance involves theexercise of discretionary authority constrained by formal rules. Formal rules setboundaries to permissible behavior but do not eliminate discretion. They areseldom sufficiently clear, specific, and consistent to realize the bureaucratic idealof mechanical rule application. The ambiguity and indeterminacy that inevitablydwell in electoral codes require election authorities to exercise some measure ofadministrative discretion. The exercise of this discretion, however, may put intoquestion administrative efficiency and political neutrality (Schedler, 2000)—hence, the demand for public accountability.

Accountability involves three key dimensions: information, justification, andenforcement (Schedler, 1999c). Strategies of accountability in electoralgovernance have hitherto focused on the first aspect. Nonpartisan electionmonitoring, partisan oversight, public opinion polling, and official sunshinepolicies are all aimed at maximizing the transparency of the electoral process.Transparency helps to prevent, detect, and correct irregularities as well as todocument the integrity of election organizations. The presence of partyrepresentatives in consultative bodies, media scrutiny, and academic investigationsof election management oblige election officials to publicly justify their decisionsin the light of legal provisions, normative principles, and material constraints.Finally, enforcement provisions specifying sanctions for dereliction of duties aredesigned to discourage abuses of discretionary authority in electoral governancethrough material incentives.

While indispensable for making electoral governance efficient, neutral, andcredible, securing accountability may undermine these very goals. Facilitatingreasonable trade-offs hinges on the choice of institutions and strategies ofaccountability. For instance, the central deployment of “police patrols” maysometimes be less effective for controlling local election officials than a relianceon decentralized mechanisms of “fire alarms” (McCubbins and Schwartz, 1984).Bureaucratic rigidity in the “keeping of detailed records and the establishment ofaudit trails” (Maley, 2000: 6) may divert scarce resources from substantiveactivities. In sum, the challenge is not to maximize but to optimize accountability.

Third, at the level of rule adjudication, electoral governance involves themediation and settlement of disputes arising out of the process and the results ofvoting and electoral competition. Settling disputes over election results is a vitalfunction of electoral governance, as shown by the decisions of the various local,state and federal appeals courts, and, most dramatically, by the decision of the USSupreme Court in the 2000 US presidential elections. Rule adjudicationprominently involves the authoritative resolution of disputes that arise fromambiguities in complex election rules and operational problems in theirimplementation. For example, when the Ghana Election Commission’s vagueguidelines failed to clarify whether the old thumbprint voter identification cardsused in previous elections or the new photo identification cards would be valid forthe 7 December 2000 national elections, the Ghana Supreme Court determinedfour days before the elections that both cards would be considered valid. Thecontroversy arose because only 80 percent of the old cards had been replaced with




new ones by the time elections were held (Temin, 2000). By providing institutionalmechanisms for amelioration of electoral errors and peaceful management ofresulting political conflicts, the impartial and expedient adjudication of electoraldisputes represents a cornerstone of the procedural legitimacy of democraticelections.

Institutionalization of Democratic UncertaintyCompetitive elections are the hallmark of modern representative democracy. Asthe institutionalized means by which large numbers of people participatepeacefully in selecting and removing governments, they are the primary, albeit notthe only, source of democratic legitimacy.6 In electoral politics, as in other spheresof modern life, formal institutions are seen as legitimate only when theirsubstantive outcomes are indeterminate. Political actors will accept theuncertainty of outcomes in electoral competition to the extent that the rules thatorganize the competition do not ex ante determine those outcomes. In electoralcontests as well as court proceedings, procedural legitimacy presupposessubstantive uncertainty (Luhmann, 1983). Substantive uncertainty, then, is areliable measure of the impartiality of institutions. If winners and losers are knownbeforehand, institutions appear biased. The “discriminating factor” between“efficient” (impartial) and “redistributive” (biased) institutions lies in “theuncertainty of the outcomes they produce” (Tsebelis, 1990: 117).

The close association between procedural legitimacy and substantiveuncertainty poses the paradoxical challenge of “institutionalizing uncertainty”(Przeworksi, 1988: 63). The paradox is that substantive uncertainty requiresprocedural certainty.7 It is this paradox that defines the central task of electoralgovernance: organizing electoral uncertainty by providing institutional certainty.Distinguishing between substantive and procedural uncertainty enables a morenuanced understanding of variations in political actors’ risk-aversion.Authoritarian and democratic actors, for instance, exhibit different attitudestowards uncertainty. While the former attempt to reduce the uncertainty ofoutcomes, the latter attempt to reduce the uncertainty of institutional rules.

If the central task of electoral governance is to institutionalize democraticuncertainty, failure to do so may originate at any of its three levels. Authoritarianactors may try to reduce electoral uncertainty by mobilizing bias at the stage ofinstitutional design, implementation, or dispute settlement. As long as electoralgovernance artificially reduces electoral uncertainty at any of its three levels,electoral processes are unlikely to be perceived as fully democratic or, byimplication, fully legitimate. First, the primary “challenge of a transition is tonegotiate electoral rules that all parties can accept and respect” (Pastor, 1999b:15). Unless opposition parties perceive the basic rules of competition to be“reasonably fair” (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986: 58) they will refuse toparticipate in the electoral contest or fail to accept its results. If “for whateverreason, right or wrong, [electoral] rules are perceived as illegitimate, thendemocracy is in trouble” (Taagepera, 1998: 80).

Second, reaching political compromises at the initial stage of institutionalchoice does not preclude future organizational failures. New electoral institutionsare chosen under the pressure of political uncertainty surrounding regimetransitions. Their choice reflects short-term calculations that do not accuratelyanticipate future contingencies. Operational problems inherent in bureaucratic




routines and administrative decision-making reduce organizational efficiency. Anyor all of these factors, as well as a lingering authoritarian impulse to containelectoral uncertainty, are likely to undermine the ability of electoral governance tomeet minimum standards of administrative integrity at the level of ruleapplication, precipitating the decision of opposition parties to withdraw fromflawed elections and reject their results.

Third, the resolution of electoral disputes represents the concluding act ofelectoral contests. Failure at this final stage may ruin any advances made at priorstages. Controlling the judges can be the easiest way of controlling electoraloutcomes (Eisenstadt, this issue). But the reverse is true as well. When the electionmanagement founders, electoral conflict adjudication may still provide aninstitutional safety-valve. Organizational failures may be “redeemed” by judicialactions that resolve complaints fairly and expediently. The entry of political partiesinto electoral competition implies their acceptance of its basic rules, which inmany instances they helped design in the first place. But experience, pragmatism,and self-interest often lead them to qualify their endorsement of rule application,making their acceptance of the electoral process contingent on the expectedcapacity of existing conflict mediation agencies to rectify eventual administrativeirregularities.

Indeterminate EmbeddednessThe claim that competitive elections foster democratic legitimacy is obvious. Theclaim that electoral governance contributes substantially to this effect is obviousintuitively, but less so analytically. To what extent, if any, does electoral governancedetermine the democratic quality of elections? Doesn’t that quality depend simplyon the incumbent parties’ willingness and capacity to manipulate the process orhold free and fair elections? Does electoral governance have an autonomousimpact or does it merely express the prevailing correlations of power betweenincumbents and opposition? How much variance does it explain in patterns ofpolitical democratization?

We possess few systematic answers to these questions. This is due largely to thefact that serious interest in electoral governance is the product of the practicalexperience of international election monitoring and democracy assistance overthe past two decades. Most practitioners and scholars who have participated inthese activities and have been concerned with issues of electoral integrity havebeen more interested in evaluating than in systematically explaining democraticprogress. They have treated electoral manipulation not as an explanatory variablebut a measure of democratization, not as a cause but an indicator. Accordingly,they have focused attention on measurement problems, on the intriguingquestion of how to conceptualize, observe, measure, weight, and aggregateviolations of democratic norms that may occur during the electoral process (seeChoe and Darnolf, 1999; Elklit and Svensson, 1997).

Given the absence of an extensive, analytically rigorous literature, we cannotpresent a coherent set of theoretical insights grounded in systematic examinationof the role of electoral governance in the process of democratization. Yet,recognition of two basic ideas seems to be an indispensable starting point forcomparative research: (1) the institutional and societal embeddedness of struc-tures and processes of electoral governance and (2) the intrinsic indeterminacy ofcontext in situations of regime change.




(1) Like all democratic institutions, electoral governance institutions neitheremerge from nor operate in a vacuum. History and context shape their choice andconsequences, not inexorably or uniformly, but by defining the structure in whichdifferentially endowed actors make strategic choices. Analytically, then, electoralgovernance institutions are best understood as “embedded institutions” (Grofmanet al., 1999; Przeworksi and Teune, 1970). Their origins and unfolding trajectoriesflow out of power struggles and normative choices that are grounded in historicalconfigurations of institutional, cultural, and socioeconomic factors. Thus,contextual features, such as macrolevel variables of the political system andmicrolevel choices of political actors, shape not only the choice of rules thatconfigure the structure and process of electoral governance but also theiroperational effectiveness and political outcomes.

Some select examples provide support for the preceding theoretical statements.In Senegal with a short democratic history under a single-party dominant “semi-democratic” regime, the incumbent president, concerned with retaining executivecontrol and determining the pace and scope of incremental democratization,agreed to the demand of an increasingly unified opposition for an independentelection commission with only oversight responsibility, retaining the administra-tive responsibility for the organization and conduct of elections within theministry of the interior (Mozaffar and Vengroff, 1999, forthcoming). In democratictransitions in the former Soviet Central Asian Republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstanand Uzbekistan, electoral governance institutions emerged as negotiatedsettlements of power struggles between regional and central elites entrenched byprotracted communist rule (Jones Luong, 2000). Finally, in the 1996 elections inGhana, a country with previous, albeit checkered, democratic experience and atradition of inter-elite accommodation, the open and constructive attitude of theelectoral commission, exemplified especially by its willingness to involve theopposition parties closely in key decisions on the organization of the election,played an important role in overcoming lingering doubts about its politicalimpartiality (Gyimah-Boadi, 1999).

These examples obviously do not exhaust the questions that could framesystematic analysis of the contextual embeddedness of electoral governance. Forinstance, what, if any, is the relationship between the form of government(parliamentary or presidential) and the structure, process, and outcome ofelectoral governance? How does the territorial organization of power (unitary orfederal) affect electoral governance? Do party systems (two-party or multi-party)affect the form and function of electoral governance? And how do patterns ofethnopolitical diversity affect the choice, operation and outcomes of electoralgovernance institutions?

(2) In their seminal essay, O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986: 3) described regimetransitions as highly indeterminate periods of “extraordinary uncertainty.” Sincethen it has become commonplace among students of democratization to conceivedemocratic transitions as times of “intense political uncertainty” (Bratton and vande Walle, 1997: 10) in which, in the extreme, “anything might be possible”(Goodin, 1998: 47, emphasis removed). Transitions thus appear as periods ofinstitutional crisis where the basic rules of the political game look uncertain. Foragents of electoral governance, the uncertainties of regime change involve risks aswell as opportunities. Democratic transitions magnify the intrinsic contradictionbetween control and legitimacy that is routinely present in political life.Authoritarian rulers who feel compelled to hold competitive elections in the face




of domestic and international pressures confront the dilemma of risking their(even nominal) democratic credentials if they do not restrain their desire tomanipulate the election process to secure favorable outcomes. Convokingelections thus opens a window of opportunity. The window may be small andopaque, but it cannot be sealed hermetically. In all but the worst electoral farces,agents of electoral governance possess some degree of freedom in fosteringcredible elections (Schedler, this issue). This may be true even in harshlyauthoritarian regimes, such as Uruguay in 1980 and Chile in 1988. Military rulersin both countries lost plebiscites they themselves convoked, thanks not least to aresuscitated pre-authoritarian tradition of clean election management.

Structure of Electoral GovernanceNumerous contextual factors shape the process of electoral governance. Theprevailing correlation of forces between incumbents and opposition is perhaps themost obvious determinant of the fate of electoral processes. But there are goodreasons to expect that formal institutions may matter as well. Rule-configuredformal structures may decisively constrain the otherwise unfettered exercise ofpower by political elites. However, among the innumerable rules that prescribeformal roles and responsibilities for the organization and regulation of elections,which do we expect to be decisive? Which variations in institutional design do weexpect to matter most? We suggest that an initial research agenda on theinstitutional foundations of electoral governance should pay attention toinstitutional choices along six basic dimensions: centralization, bureaucratization,independence, specialization, delegation, and regulation.

Centralization. The decentralized structure of electoral governance found, forinstance, in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, is widelyconsidered to be unworkable in new democracies. The fear that local power-brokers might hijack electoral processes has blocked any move in this direction.Central control over the organization of national elections is viewed asindispensable for preventing the possible feudalization of electoral governance.Still, in federal systems, electoral designers have to decide whether to make thenational election management body responsible for the organization ofsubnational elections as well. Democratizing Mexico, for example, developed adual structure whereby each federal state replicates the national system ofelectoral governance, complete with its own electoral institute and tribunal incharge of state and municipal elections. Yet, electoral reforms in the mid-1990sextended the jurisdiction of the federal electoral tribunal to local conflicts,erecting it as the appellate court of last instance in all electoral matters. Aninteresting comparative research question is if and how appellate courts in federalsystems introduce elements of central control into otherwise decentralized systemsof electoral governance, thus homogenizing both electoral laws and electoralpractices at subnational levels.8

Bureaucratization. Institutional designers have to decide whether to establish apermanent election commission and, if so, whether to put it at the top of apermanent bureaucratic apparatus (Mozaffar, this issue). Ad hoc commissions thathave to start “from scratch at every new election” have become “extremely rare”among contemporary democracies (López-Pintor, n.d.: 57, 59). Still, a wide




variation exists in the size of the full-time professional staff of electoralcommissions. The Mexican Federal Electoral Institute, for example, employs apermanent staff of over 10 000 officials, while to run a national legislative electionthe Indian Election Commission borrows some 4.5 million staffers “from variousgovernmental agencies” and places them “temporarily under [its] total command”(Gill, 1998: 166).

An independent electoral commission with a permanent administrativeapparatus raises questions about intra-organizational processes, especially withrespect to patterns and effectiveness of control and accountability (Schedler,1999a). For example, central control of lower officials may help to increaseaccountability and reduce errors due to local discretion but at the cost ofinefficiency and rigidity. The problem is typically one of balancing related butmutually competing, not mutually exclusive, imperatives that underpin andanimate all organizations. Variations in central control over recruitment poseadditional dilemmas, since the quality, independence, and commitment ofpersonnel are crucial for institutional credibility. The dilemma is especially salientin transitional elections where, as in Cambodia in 1998 (Neou, 1999: 155),authoritarian incumbents’ success in staffing electoral bureaucracies confrontdemocratic actors with the problem of dealing with loyalist holdovers in publicadministration.

Independence. In most Western European democracies, responsibility fororganizing elections rests with the central state, with the ministry of the interiorusually executing that responsibility under the supervision of either a judicial or amultiparty body. A reliable tradition of bureaucratic neutrality is the preconditionfor leaving the responsibility for electoral governance to the state. In most newdemocracies, however, the absence of trustworthy state bureaucracy “usable” (Linzand Stepan, 1996: 10) for democratic purposes renders such an optionunworkable. Not surprisingly, therefore, removing electoral governance fromexecutive control has turned into a rallying cry of democratizing forces all over theglobe. Establishing an independent electoral commission, in fact, has become acompelling international norm, a sine qua non of electoral credibility. With thenotable exceptions of some Eastern European and francophone African countries(Mozaffar, this issue), new democracies have “almost invariably [moved] in thedirection of establishing independent electoral commissions independently of[their] historical political traditions” (López-Pintor, n.d.: 41).

The idea of establishing such “islands of integrity” (Eigen, 1996) by means ofinstitutional independence carries strong intuitive appeal. We possess littlesystematic knowledge, however, of how different formal rules translate into actualpractice. In principle, we should be prepared to find a similar tendency studentsof central bank independence have identified in developing countries. In contextsof high “informal institutionalization” (O’Donnell, 1996), the legal independenceof central banks turns out to be “a questionable proxy for behavioralindependence” (Maxfield, 1999: 286). If the realm of electoral governancedisplays the same loose coupling between formal institutions and actual practice,we should see deviations in both directions. We should see institutions that areindependent on paper, but intimidated, colonized, or neutralized in practice bygovernmental authorities. And we should see electoral authorities actingindependently despite their formal subordination to government agencies. ThePeruvian elections board for the 2000 elections exemplifies the former situation,




while the Nicaraguan electoral commission of 1990 illustrates the latter. Clarifyingthe conditions under which formal rules of electoral governance are likely to beeffective is thus a promising topic of research.

Specialization. The administrative and judicial functions of electoral governancecan be fused, as in Costa Rica’s Supreme Tribunal of Elections endowed in 1949with full responsibility for both electoral management and electoral certification.Or they can be separated, with the responsibility for settling electoral disputesbeing assigned to either another branch of government, a specialized tribunal, orthe ordinary court system. Legislative “self-certification” was highly popular in theAmericas throughout the nineteenth century (and still is in the United States).But its conflictual fusion of roles analyzed by Fabrice Lehoucq (this issue) hasdiscredited it beyond repair.9 In Mexico, successive electoral reforms elevated theautonomous Federal Electoral Tribunal, founded in 1986, as the final arbiter overall electoral disputes. Finally, reliance on the ordinary court system for thesettlement of electoral disputes is the most widespread solution in contemporarydemocracies. In principle, it works as well as ordinary courts work. If the judicialsystem is biased and ineffective, it may actually subvert progress achieved in theimpartial and professional administration of elections. In Ghana, for example,legal challenges of the 1996 legislative elections tended “to drag on seeminglyinterminably” (Gyimah-Boadi, 1999: 118). The ineffectiveness, inconsistency, andtimidity of appellate courts ended up creating the strong impression that even inthe face of evident irregularities, “once declared, reversal of election results ismost unlikely” (ibid.). The 2000 post-electoral disputes in the United Statesshowed that the judiciary may lose its aura of professional reliability and legalimpartiality when called upon to adjudicate divisive political conflicts.

Delegation. Where the ruling party cannot be trusted to run fair elections, a logicaloption for incumbents and opposition is to establish structures of mutual restraint.Above all, they may agree to concur in the appointment of the members of thenational election commission. Such structures of cooperation may take two forms.Parties may develop a quasi-consociational scheme of “power sharing” with apluralistic “partisan” body of electoral administration that includes oppositionrepresentatives as powerful “veto players” alongside representatives from theruling party. In this scheme, political parties appoint their own representatives (asin Honduras) or a legislative majority appoints representatives on the basis offormal party quota (as in El Salvador until 1993).10 Alternatively, instead ofnominating party representatives, the major parties may select individuals (eitherexperts or notables) with a reputation for independence and impartiality. Insteadof sharing power in a multiparty commission, they may delegate power to apresumptively neutral, non-partisan body. Canada, Australia since 1984, Mexicosince 1994, and Venezuela in 1998 and 1999 fit this “delegative” scheme.

If trusted “third parties” exist either in the judiciary or in civil society, politicalparties may decide to abdicate their authority to determine the composition of topelectoral offices. They may leave the appointment of election managers either inthe hands of citizens (as in Paraguay since 1992), elected local and regionalassemblies (as envisaged in the 1987 Haitian constitution), the judiciary (as inBrazil and Costa Rica), or civil associations (as in Guatemala and Peru). Thesenon-partisan bodies (Haiti excepted) usually appoint non-partisan electionofficers. In Colombia, by contrast, judicial authorities elect party representatives in




numbers roughly proportional to the composition of the national parliament(Jaramillo, 1998: 217).11

The three ideal-typical modes of electoral governance—power sharing, dele-gation, and abdication—open up an intriguing field of research. How do differentinstitutional solutions affect the efficiency and credibility of electoral com-missions? What strategic and contextual factors account for the choice of onesolution over another? For instance, it is plausible to assume that high levels ofdistrust between parties in democratizing countries motivates them to set upindependent election-management bodies (López-Pintor, n.d.: 52, 55). However,while distrust of the government may explain why opposition parties struggle todismantle executive dominance in the organization of elections, it cannot explainparties’ micro-institutional choices. It cannot explain, for example, why partiessometimes cede control over electoral governance to independent experts (thedelegative design) and sometimes set up multiparty commissions and retaincontrol (the consociational design). One possible explanation lies in the structureof the party system. Political parties are likely to decide on power sharing in a two-party system and choose a delegative design in a more fragmented multipartysystem (Molina and Hernández, 1999). In the former system, a partisancommission gives veto powers to both players. In the latter, some parties may formexclusionary alliances against others.

Regulation. As principal-agent theory tells us, distrustful “principals” may try tolimit the damage their “agents” may cause by constraining them through detailed“contracts.” That is, principals may attempt to reduce agents’ discretion by sealingthem in bureaucratic cages. Electoral reformers often intend to do the same. Theytry to minimize the discretion of electoral bureaucracies by subjecting them toextensive legal regulation. In the course of the country’s democratic transition,Mexico’s electoral law, for instance, has experienced a major distrust-driven shiftfrom loose subregulation to dense overregulation (Schedler, 2001). Here, again,the current state of comparative research presents more questions than answers.For instance, what is the role of electoral regulation under authoritarian regimes?Under which conditions do opposition parties trust the effectiveness of legalchanges? What is the role of international diffusion in the drive towards tightelectoral regulation? How much do formal changes of electoral rules depend onchanges in the correlation of forces between government and opposition tobecome effective? And for how long do formal constraints survive the distrust thatgives birth to them?

Process of Electoral GovernanceSystematic analysis linking structure and process requires specifying andidentifying the empirical components of the process. This is difficult for electoralprocesses. One obstacle for empirical research lies in the inordinate complexity ofelectoral processes. Another derives from the fact that assessing both theeffectiveness of electoral governance and the democratic quality of elections oftenrequires exploring systematic irregularities that by their very nature are difficult todocument. The reliability and validity of data measuring the process componentsof elections are likely to be suspect. Attempts to surmount these methodologicalproblems have produced four approaches to identifying and collecting relevantdata: (1) comprehensive, (2) selective, (3) subjective, and (4) indirect.




(1) The comprehensive approach: Inspired by the practical experience ofinternational election monitoring and democracy assistance of the past twentyyears, the so called checklist approach suggests studying electoral processes intheir entirety to detect irregularities at any point along the way. Starting out with anarrow search for irregularities on election day, international monitors have cometo compile comprehensive lists of items requiring evaluation in order to reach ameaningful judgment on the quality of a given election. Some scholars suggestadopting a similar approach. For instance, addressing the question of “what makeselections free and fair,” Elklit and Svensson (1997) propose a “checklist of electionassessment” that contains over forty independent aspects to be evaluated before,during, and after election day, from basic liberties to impartial dispute settlement.In a later, more explicit effort at translating the checklist approach into a researchagenda, Elklit and Reynolds (2000: Table 1), suggest that the systematic study ofelectoral governance should cover close to fifty “important elements,” fromappointment procedures of election officials to the rules governing publication ofelectoral results.

No doubt all the aspects included in such comprehensive checklists lookimportant. But are some more important than others? And how do all theprocedural details add up to a final judgment? As Pastor (1998: 159) notes, andElklit and Svensson (1997: 36) readily admit, checklists do not tell us “how toweight each item on the list” nor do they provide “a formula to aggregate theanswers.” In addition to such methodological problems, checklists pose enormouspractical challenges. Many electoral processes are of breathtaking administrativeand logistical complexity, roughly proportional to the size and heterogeneity ofthe country in question. The investment of time and money required for collect-ing adequate data for even minimally systematic analysis would be prohibitive. Whileindispensable for reaching nuanced judgment on the state of electoral democracyin a given country, the approach is largely unworkable for comparative analysis.

(2) The selective approach: This approach restricts analysis to specific issues ofelectoral governance and is thus more useful for comparative research. Choe(1997) offers a comparative evaluation of election management in South Korea,Sweden, and the United Kingdom. But three countries might be about the largestN a comprehensive study of electoral governance is able to cover. Combining thevirtues of analytical depth and comparative breadth will perforce dictate a focuson specific issues. The volume on political-party financing edited by Burnell andWare (1998) as well as the collaborative work on voter registration edited byCourtney (1991) are good examples of the comparative study of single proceduralaspects of electoral governance.

(3) The subjective approach: If the complexity of electoral processes and theopacity of systematic irregularities impede in-depth analysis of electoralgovernance, scholars may rely on the subjective perceptions of the major victims ofelectoral manipulation, the opposition parties. Accordingly, some authors haveadvanced operational definitions of democratic elections that rest entirely onactor perceptions. Robert Pastor has been most explicit in renouncing thepretension of assessing electoral processes independently of opposition parties’own evaluative judgments. A “free and fair” election, he stipulates, “is one in whichthe major parties all accept the process and respect the results” (Pastor, 1998:160). Conversely, a “flawed” election is “one in which some or all of the majorpolitical parties refuse to participate in the election or reject the results” (Pastor,1999b: 15).12




Substituting the “subjective” perceptions of political actors for “objective”indicators of electoral integrity makes practical sense. A reliance on participantperspectives has been a common practice in the study of other spheres of illicitactivity that are also closed to public scrutiny. In corruption research, for instance,the Corruption Perception Index published annually by the NGO TransparencyInternational has turned into the most widely used comparative measure ofpolitical and administrative corruption. The index aggregates the perceptions of“international business leaders, risk analysts, and business journalists on therelative degree of corruption in more than fifty countries” (Galtung and Pope,1999: 275). Developing an analogous Electoral Integrity Perception Index, basedon opinion polls of opposition leaders, grass roots activists, journalists, or citizens,could shed light into the black box of electoral manipulation.

In the absence of viable alternatives, the relative reliability of actor perceptionsprovides an additional justification for using them in assessments of electoralquality. When opposition parties hold an electoral process to be free and fair, wehave few reasons not to believe them. In their uphill battle against the advantagesof incumbency, opposition parties usually have a strong interest in free, fair, andclean elections. Accordingly, they have a strong interest in denouncing acts ofelectoral manipulation and are not likely to under-report such violations ofdemocratic norms. Still, we should not exclude the possibility that they may over-report them as well. Opposition parties by and large do not boycott elections “outof fear of losing but because they believe no one is listening” (Pastor, 1998: 161).Nevertheless, we should take into account that they may be tempted to exaggeratethe phenomenon.

Lehoucq and Molina (forthcoming) as well as Eisenstadt (1998) have studiedthe politics of electoral fraud in historical Costa Rica and contemporary Mexico,respectively, on the basis of legal denunciations of fraud. Yet these authors havebeen sensitive to the incentives that may drive opposition parties to misrepresentthe quality of an election. While Lehoucq and Molina argue that the electoral lawsin force deterred parties from formulating frivolous claims, Eisenstadt (1998:30–36) scrutinizes a broad sample of case files in order to distinguish betweengeneric photocopied “knock-off” complaints and serious claims of irregularities.

Thus, even if it seems fruitful to take opposition perceptions as an indirectmeasure of electoral integrity, we should not forget the difference betweenconceptual understanding and operational indicators of democratic elections.Collapsing perceptions and realities may lead not only to misjudgments about thedemocratic quality of an election, but also to abandoning the possibility ofstudying public perceptions and public discourse in their own right. Thecomparative study of elite and mass perceptions of electoral manipulation is afield too rich and unexplored to be closed off by operational definitions that blurthe distinction between the operational measure of electoral legitimacy and theunderlying concept of electoral quality (Schedler, 1999b).13

(4) The indirect approach: Allegations of electoral manipulation becomeirrelevant when opposition parties win an election. But if the incumbent managesto win, it is often hard to assess the quality of the electoral processes it organizes,and it is also hard to know whether the incumbent would have actually quit powerin the case of losing the election. Some authors think we neither know “whatmight have happened” in the counterfactual case of an opposition victory, nor canwe “assess the degree of repression, intimidation, or fraud for each election . . . ina reliable way” (Przeworski et al., 2000: 24).14 They conclude that it is only by




looking at electoral results that we can learn whether multiparty elections aredemocratic or not. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof ofdemocracy is in the alternation of government. Only if competitive elections allowfor alternation in power do they provide tangible proof of their democraticcharacter. As long as they confirm incumbents in office, we have to remainskeptical as to their democratic nature, even if they were “considered to be freeand fair by observers” (Geddes, 1999: 116). Relying on the substantive results ofelections resolves by circumvention two methodological problems. It circumventsthe complex challenge of assessing the democratic quality of electoral processes.And it circumvents the complex challenge of assessing the chances thatincumbents may eventually reverse electoral results that favor the opposition.

The four approaches to studying the process of electoral governance invitepragmatic recombinations, dictated by research objectives. The checklist approachseems appropriate for reaching normative judgment on the democratic quality ofelections in a given country. By contrast, reliance on alternation in governmentallows classification of political regimes for large-N research without having toaddress complex issues of electoral integrity. For the comparative study ofprocesses of electoral governance, combining the “selective” with the “subjective”approach might be useful. On the one hand, when traveling from case studiesbased on comprehensive checklists to more comparative studies we need to besensitive to the perceptions of political parties. Their criticisms may reveal ways ofidentifying the critical issues of interest. On the other hand, we may double-checkallegations of electoral manipulation by studying the points of vulnerabilityopposition parties are concerned about. If we are interested in the politics (andnot just the technicalities) of electoral manipulation, we have to listen toopposition parties. We cannot understand, let alone predict, the politicalconsequences of electoral irregularities without comprehending the discoursesand strategies of opposition actors. But if we want to do more than public opinionpolling, we should be prepared to check their claims of electoral manipulation onthe basis of available evidence in order to reach independent judgment on thequality of a disputed election.

Comparative and Historical PerspectivesThe contributions to this thematic issue of the International Political Science Reviewundertake the first systematic expeditions into the vast territories of electoralgovernance charted in this Introduction. Their perspective is comparative andhistorical, and their purpose empirical and conceptual. Even as they strive toadvance our empirical knowledge of electoral governance and democratization,they develop valuable analytical tools to study the phenomenon. Overall, thearticles focus on the institutional side of electoral governance, exploring thecomplex origins as well as the problematic consequences of institutional choices.

Revising the electoral history of the Americas, Fabrice E. Lehoucq addresses anissue of paramount importance to the institutional design of electoral governance:Can parties police themselves? His answer is in the negative. The traditionaldesign of electoral governance in presidential systems assigns the responsibility fororganizing elections to the executive, and the responsibility for certifying electionresults to the legislature. Mutual restraint between the two branches is supposed toguarantee the impartial conduct of elections. Lehoucq shows, however, that in themodern world of political parties the nineteenth-century formula of electoral




checks and balances leads either to interbranch collusion, where one partycontrols both branches, or to interbranch confrontation in the case of dividedgovernment. The author develops a simple game in extensive form todemonstrate the structural propensity to corruption and conflict inherent in theseparation-of-power model. In addition, he cites ample historical evidence tosupport his strong institutionalist argument that leaving electoral governance inthe hands of contending parties has historically been a recipe for interbranchconflict and political instability. The article invites a fundamental rereading of theinstitutional development of the Americas. In neither North nor South diddemocratic instability grow out of history or culture; rather, it was born out of thefailure to institutionalize impartial institutions of electoral governance. Thosecountries that took alternative institutional paths and established nonpartisanelection commissions broke out of the cycle of rigged elections and partisanconflict. Where electoral governance was able to provide the requisite proceduralcertainties of democracy, politics could turn from armed conflicts over the rules ofthe game to peaceful competition within the rules of the game.

In his article on electoral court failure, Todd A. Eisenstadt delivers a systematicassessment of the autonomy and effectiveness of emerging electoral institutions inMexico’s federal states. He starts out with methodological reflections on the studyof electoral fraud, followed by an analytical synthesis of the complex interactionsopposition parties and the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) sustainedduring Mexico’s protracted transition. He then examines the emerging electoralcourts at the state level. Attentive to the possible gap between formal rules andinformal practice, he studies both sides of the institutional coin—the legalstructure as well as the actual working of the fledgling tribunals. On the one hand,he provides an insightful classification of formal institutional development fromthe late 1980s to the late 1990s. In three successive waves of legal reform thatroughly paralleled the pioneering electoral reforms at the federal level, stateelectoral tribunals changed from non-autonomous to autonomous institutionswith a brief interregnum at the intermediate level of semi-autonomy. On the otherhand, Eisenstadt studies the extent to which formal reform was followed bychanges in court behavior as well as in party behavior towards judicialproceedings. He finds that legal changes did give way to behavioral changes.Electoral tribunals actually managed to overcome various forms of institutionalfailure (caused mostly by external interference by the ruling PRI), while oppositionparties started to use them as they got more and more autonomous in form as wellas in substance. Still, the original data presented by the author reveal an intriguingtime-lag between institutional reform and actual compliance. Medium levels ofcourt autonomy multiplied post-electoral conflicts rather than channeling theminto the judicial arena. This temporal pattern of institutional developmentprovides an important general insight. Formal institutions matter. But even if theylook nice on paper they have to prove in practice that they matter before actorsstart taking them seriously.

New electoral institutions may be weak and ineffective. But they may also becounterproductive, and generate hidden side-effects that run counter todemocratic principles. In his contribution, Frederic C. Schaffer analyzes thepossible exclusionary consequences of democratic reform. May clean electionreforms, he asks, cause citizens to drop out of electoral participation? Drawingupon a wide range of historical and contemporary evidence, he argues that undercertain circumstances progressive reforms may indeed have depressive effects on




voter participation. Furthermore, despite the universalistic justification of legalreforms, their exclusionary effects often show a clear bias against certain groups ofvoters. Designed to control electoral corruption, legal reforms may removeincentives or set up obstacles to the participation of specific groups of citizens.Schaffer discusses three kinds of regressive effects progressive reforms mayengender: the disenfranchisement of opposition voters; the attrition of local partyactivism; and negative vote-buying (with parties purchasing the abstention of theiropponents’ supporters). Such effects are partly intentional. But they are also theunforeseen consequences of decentralized actors adapting strategically to, andcreatively subverting, the new legal constraints. Whether incumbents are able todevise biased election laws, the author observes, depends on the ability of partyagents to identify and act upon opposition voters. It also depends on prevailingcorrelations of power. If opposition parties are weak, unchecked incumbents maybe tempted to implement legal changes that are neutral in form, butdiscriminatory in effect. As Schaffer stresses in his cautious conclusions, hisfindings should not be read as an argument against democratizing reform. Thequestion is not whether to make elections clean, but how to reconcile electoralintegrity with electoral inclusiveness.

In his article on the structures and origins of election management bodies(EMBs) in sub-Saharan Africa, Shaheen Mozaffar shifts attention from theconsequences of electoral institutions to their origins. He first constructs anoriginal database that classifies EMBs in 41 African countries according to theirdegree of institutional autonomy. He finds that sub-Saharan African countrieshave followed the global trend towards independent election commissions.Slightly more than half the countries in Africa have established legallyautonomous EMBs in the course of their democratic transitions, while over one-fourth have established at least semi-autonomous EMBs. Mozaffar then develops anordered probit model to estimate the effects of four variables on the choice ofEMBs: (1) institutional legacies of colonial rule, measured in terms of theanglophone tradition of institutional devolution and decentralized governanceversus the francophone and lusophone tradition of statism and centralizedgovernance; (2) political legacies of postcolonial African authoritarian regimes,measured in terms of the frequency of (often restricted) elections and the level ofpolitical competition they permitted; (3) structures of ethnopolitical cleavagesthat shape the power relations and inform the institutional preferences of pro-democracy groups and authoritarian incumbents; and (4) the resulting politicalnegotiations between them. The model generally confirms the expected effects ofthese variables on the choice of EMBs. Predicted probabilities calculated from theprobit coefficients correctly predict the likelihood that an African country willchoose a non-autonomous, semi-autonomous or an autonomous EMB due to theseparate effect of each independent variable. Anglophone institutional legaciesare more likely than francophone ones to influence the choice of autonomousEMBs. High frequency of elections under post-colonial authoritarian regimes islikely to foster the choice of non-autonomous EMBs. But high levels of politicalcompetition under postcolonial authoritarian regimes, high ethnopoliticalfragmentation, and the incidence of political negotiations over the choice of newdemocratic institutions all increase the likelihood of African countries choosingautonomous EMBs.

To complete this thematic issue, Andreas Schedler opens his article on thedynamics of democratization by elections with a comparative look at the “menu of




electoral manipulation” ruling parties have at their disposal to control electoraloutcomes. His list includes some old themes: fraud, repression, and unfairness.But it also features some issues that have received much less attention: themanipulation of actors and cleavages, and the manipulation of rules ofcompetition. Schedler argues that manipulated elections are deeply ambiguousand thus profoundly contested processes. As a result, rather than establishing aninstitutional equilibrium, they tend to trigger a self-reinforcing spiral ofdemocratization by elections. Schedler introduces the heuristic model of a“nested” two-level game to capture the interaction between electoral reform andelectoral competition that drives such “self-subversive” processes. He outlines thecausal interaction and strategic interdependence of the two levels. He describesthe basic strategic choices and strategic dilemmas actors face in iterative cycles ofconflict. He analyzes the uncertainties of outcomes, relations of power, andstrategic responses that characterize the game. Finally, he explains how actors maycope with the ambivalent and uncertain nature of the game, namely, by devisingseemingly contradictory strategies and by privileging one level of the game overthe other.

Notes1. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA)

in Stockholm, the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) and theNational Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Washington, DC, the UN in New York, andthe Centro de Asesoría y Promoción Electoral (CAPEL) of the Inter-American Institute ofHuman Rights in Costa Rica, are among the most prominent international players inthe field. Much of the evidence on the political relevance of electoral governance iscontained in the reports written by these institutions in connection with technicalassistance projects. In addition, they have made laudable efforts to make the enormousamounts of existing materials readily available to scholars and practitioners worldwide.The Administration and Cost of Elections (ACE) Project, jointly sponsored by Interna-tional IDEA, the UN, and IFES, offers the most extensive electronic collection of election-related documents [www.aceproject.org].

2. See Pierre and Peters (2000) for a more general discussion of governance as structureand process.

3. Our triangle of “conflicting imperatives” is partially inspired by Michael Maley whostresses five fundamental challenges of electoral administration: political neutrality,logistics, accountability, decentralization, and project planning (Maley: 2000: 6–7).

4. This was arguably the only incontrovertible point in the otherwise highly controversialdecision of the US Supreme Court that ended the Florida recount and handed GeorgeW. Bush the presidency. Specifically, a 7 to 2 majority determined that different criteriaused by Florida’s 67 counties to distinguish a valid from an invalid ballot violated theequal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution.

5. See “Ethical Principle 2: Election administration must be non-partisan and neutral”(International IDEA, 1997: 10–12).

6. Public deliberation, political accountability, bureaucratic rationality, and materialwelfare are some other sources of democratic legitimacy.

7. The paradox can be explained by the bounded rationality of self-interested actors andthe veil of ignorance (Rawls, 1971: 136–142) that obscure future outcomes of currentchoices. Both reduce capacity for accurate calculations of costs and benefits ofalternative strategies under new institutional arrangements. Hence, strategically rationalactors prefer to limit the discretion of other actors over alternative possibilities. Butwithout resorting to the coercive instruments of authoritarian governance, they cannotdo so without limiting their own discretion. Subjecting one’s own interests as well as




those of one’s adversaries to the uncertainty of competitive elections based on electoralrules agreed ex ante thus restricts the opportunity of all to arbitrarily change unfavorableoutcomes ex post (Przeworski, 1991: 12–13, 40–45).

8. On appellate institutions as mechanisms of hierarchical “political control,” see Shapiro(1981).

9. The United States apparently remains the only country in the Americas in which thelegislature has the final authority for electoral certification, with the US Congressresponsible for congressional and presidential elections and state legislatures forlegislative and gubernatorial elections.

10. Sometimes, the consociational principle of proportionality (Parteienproporz) works as aninformal understanding that at least each of the major players has a “quota” to fill, as inVenezuela until 1993 (see Molina and Hernández, 1999: Table 2).

11. As in most classification schemes, some countries cannot be assigned to either of thecategories. Mixed cases, such as Uruguay, assign the authority to appoint high electionofficials to various institutions.

12. Elklit and Reynolds take a similar route when conceptualizing the “quality of an election… as the extent to which the entire electoral process is seen as legitimate and bindingby political actors” (Elklit and Reynolds, 2000: 2).

13. In addition, delegating the assessment of electoral quality to opposition parties offerslittle guidance in cases where the “major political parties” differ in their publicjudgment. In the course of Mexico’s transition process, for example, the right-wingNational Action Party and the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution haveadopted contrasting strategies to cope with electoral manipulation (Gómez López,2000).

14. Granted, we never know what would have happened in counterfactual scenarios. Still, weusually do know reasonably well what might have happened, considering given sets ofactors, correlations of power, and institutional constraints.

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Biographical NotesSHAHEEN MOZAFFAR is associate professor of political science at Bridgewater State College and research fellow of the African Studies Center at Boston




University. He has published widely on the colonial state, democratization, ethnic conflicts, and electoral systems in Africa. ADDRESS: Department of PoliticalScience, Bridgewater State College, Bridgewater, MA 02325, USA [e-mail:[email protected]]ANDREAS SCHEDLER is professor of political science at the Facultad Latinoamericanade Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Mexico City. He coordinates the EGO ElectoralGovernance Network [http://flacso.edu.mx/ego] and chairs the IPSA ResearchCommittee on Concepts and Methods [www.concepts-methods.org]. He is justcompleting a book entitled The Politics of Impartiality: Democratization and ElectoralGovernance in Mexico. ADDRESS: FLACSO, Facultad Latinoamericana de CienciasSociales, Camino al Ajusco 377, Col. Héroes de Padierna, Delegación Tlalpan, CP14200 Mexico City, Mexico [e-mail: [email protected]]

Acknowledgements. Mozaffar thanks the National Science Foundation for financial supportand the Boston University African Studies Center for research support. Schedleracknowledges support from the Austrian Academy of Sciences through the AustrianProgram for Advanced Research and Technology (APART).




Documents

Mozaffar and Schedler 2002