International Influences on Election Quality and Turnover

This chapter is part of a book manuscript with the working title “MONITORING DEMOCRACY: When international election monitoring works and why it often fails.” This chapter follows a theoretical chapter that discusses the possible influence of international monitors on election quality. The present chapter is purely empirical. It examines the influence of international monitors on the quality of individual elections. Using quantitative data to examine the quality of elections provides a far greater breadth of analysis than case studies alone can accomplish. However, using quantitative data to explore the effects of monitors on a given election is complicated. As a previous book chapter discusses, whether an election is monitored depends both on the organizations' interest in observing an election and on domestic willingness to host observers. Both of these factors are likely to be related to the expected quality of an election. This is the classic problem with analyzing data on any form of nonrandom intervention. This chapter begins with a discussion of the measures used to evaluate election quality. It then uses a mix of approaches to explore the data. First it presents some descriptive overviews. It then applies some of the most cutting-edge statistical techniques to reduce the bias introduced by the selection problem discussed above and identify the effect of monitors on election quality. Two appendices are referred to throughout the chapter. Please contact the author for those appendices or other parts of the manuscript if interested