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A comprehensive look at how violence has been used to manipulate competitive electoral processes around the world since World War IIThroughout their history, political elections have been threatened by conflict, and the use of force has in the past several decades been an integral part of electoral processes in a significant number of contemporary states. However, the study of elections has yet to produce a comprehensive account of electoral violence. Drawing on cross-national datasets together with fourteen detailed case studies from around the world, Electoral Violence, Corruption, and Political Order offers a global comparative analysis of violent electoral practices since the Second World War.Sarah Birch shows that the way power is structured in society largely explains why elections are at risk of violence in some contexts but not in others. Countries with high levels of corruption and weak democratic institutions are especially vulnerable to disruptions of electoral peace. She examines how corrupt actors use violence to back up other forms of electoral manipulation, including vote buying and ballot stuffing. In addition to investigating why electoral violence takes place, Birch considers what can be done to prevent it in the future, arguing that electoral authority and the quality of electoral governance is more important than the formal design of electoral institutions.Delving into a deeply influential aspect of political malpractice, Electoral Violence, Corruption, and Political Order explores the circumstances in which individuals choose to employ violence as an electoral strategy

Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction -- Context and Argument -- Definition and Typology -- Data and Global Patterns -- Chapter Preview -- 2. Carrots and Sticks: Toward a Theory of Electoral Violence -- Power Structures and Electoral Violence -- Choices for Incumbents: Carrots, Sticks, and Cheating -- Opposition Reactions: Exit, Voice, or Disloyalty -- The Production of Electoral Violence -- Conclusion -- 3. Coercive Electoral Governance: The Use of Force by State Actors -- Choices for State Actors -- Overall Patterns -- State Violence, Fraud, and Electoral Manipulation -- Case Studies -- Conclusion -- Appendix to Chapter 3: Robustness Checks -- 4. Violence by Nonstate Actors -- The Concept of Nonstate Electoral Violence -- The Causes of Nonstate Electoral Violence -- Protest and the Production of Violence by Nonstate Actors -- Case Studies -- Conclusion -- 5. Divergent Contexts and Patterns of Violent Elections -- Violence before, during, and after Elections -- Temporal and Geographic Patterns -- Conclusion -- 6. Strategies of Electoral-Violence Prevention -- Electoral-Violence Prevention in Theory and in Practice -- The Impact of Electoral-Violence Prevention: Existing Evidence -- Electoral-Violence Prevention and Institutional Design -- Electoral-Violence Prevention and Electoral Governance -- Case Studies -- Conclusion -- 7. Conclusion: Implications for Theory, Policy, and Practice -- Summary of Findings -- Implications for Political Science -- Implications for Institutional Design -- Implications for Electoral Administration -- Implications for International Electoral Assistance -- Directions for Future Research -- References -- Index.

'Electoral Malpractice' shows how this phenomenon might be reduced by means of a variety of strategies designed to raise the cost of electoral manipulation by increasing the ability of civil society and international actors to monitor and denounce it.

Full Participation is the first book-length study of compulsory voting to be published in the English language. About a quarter of all democracies in the contemporary world legally oblige their citizens to vote, making this an important aspect of electoral systems in many settings. The study systematically examines the history of the institution, the normative arguments for and against it, and the influence it has on a range of political phenomena. These include electoral campaigns, political attitudes, electoral integrity, and legitimacy, policy outcomes, and turnout. It also considers the feasibility of introducing compulsory voting in a contemporary democracy, as well as variations on the institution designed to broaden its appeal.

Electoral Systems and Political Transformation in Post-Communist Europe assesses the influence of electoral systems on political change in 20 post-communist European states. The main finding is that electoral institutions have systematic effects on the formation of representative structures. 'Party-enabling' aspects of electoral laws such as list proportional representation tend to foster popular inclusion in politics and institutionalized party systems, whereas 'politician-enabling' rules such as single-member districts and ballots that allow voters to select individuals often favour the development of weakly structured systems and high levels of popular exclusion from the representative process

Elections and Democratization in Ukraine analyses the role of competitive elections in the Ukraine's crucial democratic transition period of 1989 to 1998, focusing on how Ukrainian voters make vote choices and which electoral cleavages are most important. Contrary to those who claim that the Soviet Union left in its wake an atomized society with weak social divisions, this study argues that the Ukrainian electorate has from the advent of competitive elections exhibited relatively stable voting behaviour.

The urgency of climate change has prompted political theorists to consider how democracy might be reconfigured to cope with the future challenges that our current social and economic practices will generate. There have been in recent years numerous promising proposals for how political systems might be reformed so as to make them more forward-looking. This article offers an assessment of a number of such proposals that touch on elections. The main contribution of the article is to bring together suggestions put forward by political theorists and evidence from empirical social science that is of relevance to these suggestions.

Este documento busca reconceptualizar la integridad electoral en términos de igualdad política y evaluar una serie de instituciones electorales en relación con la igualdad en el ámbito electoral. Sobre esta base, se sugieren extensas áreas de reforma que podrían lograr mayor igualdad en las prácticas electorales en siete áreas: financiamiento de campañas, delimitación distrital, acceso a las cédulas, participación electoral, logística electoral, justicia electoral, y reforma electoral. La evidencia comparativa sugiere que existe un amplio margen de mejora incluso en democracias de larga trayectoria y que América Latina es un espacio prometedor para la innovación en el diseño de instituciones electorales igualitarias.

AbstractThe global increase in extreme weather events in recent years has spurred political scientists to examine the potential political effects of such phenomena. This paper explores effect of flooding on electoral outcomes and offers evidence that the impact of adverse events varies with changes in political context. Using a difference‐in‐differences identification strategy to analyse three consecutive general elections in the United Kingdom (2015, 2017 and 2019), the paper finds variability in partisan electoral benefit from one election to the next that calls into question the blind retrospection and rally‐round‐the‐leader explanations which are often advanced to account for electoral reactions to natural disasters. Instead, changing party positions on environmental issues appear to account more convincingly for shifts in electoral support in response to flooding. This suggests that parties can derive benefit from, or be punished for, the positions they take on environmental issues when extreme weather events affect citizens.

Though falling turnout in recent decades has been recognised as a problem for democracy, the solutions that have been proposed have mostly been drawn from the realms of the marketplace and society, rather than that of democracy. The inadequate empirical theory that subtends many policy initiatives designed to improve turnout accounts for why these initiatives have largely failed to achieve their stated aims. I argue that electoral participation should be seen through the conceptual lens of collective action, and that this approach suggests mandatory electoral participation as an equitable and effective coordination device. I further argue that compulsory turnout offers a good fit with democratic norms of equality, rights and political obligation.