Who's There? Election Observer Identity and the Local Credibility of Elections

Election observers are an important component of transatlantic democracy promotion efforts. Prior research has sought to understand the rise of election observers and their consequences for outcomes such as fraud, protest, and violence. These studies are important, but they overlook a significant individual-level dynamic that observers themselves care about: the effect that election observers have on local attitudes about elections. How does election observer identity affect the local credibility of elections? Are American and European observers regarded as legitimate by local audiences, or are local observers more effective? We argue that the activities of election observers can enhance the local credibility of elections, but only when locals perceive observers as being both capable of detecting fraud and unbiased in that pursuit. Importantly, not all observer groups are seen as equally capable and unbiased. Evidence from a large-scale, nationally-representative experiment in Tunisia supports the argument. A key finding is that observers from the Arab League — an organization criticized internationally for low-quality election observation—enhanced credibility the most as they were the observers perceived locally as both relatively capable and unbiased.

You can listen to Who's There? Election Observer Identity and the Local Credibility of Elections online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Who's There? Election Observer Identity and the Local Credibility of Elections is an episode from Mershon Center Speaker Series by The Ohio State University.

This episode is 1:24:42 long.

This episode was published on May 1, 2018.

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