Suchergebnisse

Electoral manipulations are a mechanism of exerting permanent influence on the election result. The subjects of electoral competition want to influence their electoral opportunities. Possible dimensions of manipulations are related to the potential subjects that carry them out. The ruling ones have a higher manipulation potential than the political opposition. Electoral manipulations modify the level of political uncertainty. Its dimension is shaped in the institutional and communication spheres. The effects of electoral manipulations are more often aimed at the nearest future only, but those in the institutional sphere may shape the long-term level of political uncertainty.

Electoral manipulation is committed both during hotly contested elections as well as quite predictable ones. Comparative scholarship has sought to understand this variation, acknowledging that electoral manipulation can serve an informational as well as an instrumental role, but has not distinguished when, if ever, electoral manipulation is more likely to serve one role over another. This paper examines these issues, asking if and how strategies of manipulation differ depending on the conditions of the election. Using a newly developed measure of contestation and original data on elections from ten post-Soviet states, this paper quantitatively analyzes the types of strategies used depending on election-level factors. The results reveal that incumbents are likely to select some, but not all, types of manipulation depending on contestation of the election, the level of incumbent dominance, and the type of election being held. This paper concludes that while electoral manipulation can be used for instrumental and informational purposes, they are likely to be pursued in different elections, and that this depends on the conditions of the elections.

To what extent does electoral manipulation follow ethnic lines in Russia? Using an original dataset based on raion-level data, we find that the 'ethnic component' of electoral manipulation is more nuanced than previous studies have suggested. Electoral manipulation was most prevalent in majority-minority raions across ethnic and non-ethnic as well as richer and poorer regions. We argue that concentrations of ethnic minorities provide: (1) greater incentives for electoral manipulation by the central state and regional elites in order to signal political dominance and (2) greater capacity to carry out electoral manipulation through networks of local co-ethnic elites. However, multilevel analyses suggest that the extent of electoral manipulation was also strongly contingent on regional context. Electoral manipulation was significantly higher in the more politically volatile Muslim regions, while socioeconomic differences among regions, by contrast, had no discernible effect. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Bureaucratic compliance is often crucial for political survival, yet eliciting that compliance in weakly institutionalized environments requires that political principals convince agents that their hold on power is secure. We provide a formal model to show that electoral manipulation can help to solve this agency problem. By influencing beliefs about a ruler's hold on power, manipulation can encourage a bureaucrat to work on behalf of the ruler when he would not otherwise do so. This result holds under various common technologies of electoral manipulation. Manipulation is more likely when the bureaucrat is dependent on the ruler for his career and when the probability is high that even generally unsupportive citizens would reward bureaucratic effort. The relationship between the ruler's expected popularity and the likelihood of manipulation, in turn, depends on the technology of manipulation. Adapted from the source document.