Who monitors the monitor?: effect of party observers on electoral outcomes

Agustin Casas (), Guillermo Diaz () and Andre Trindade

UC3M Working papers. Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía

Abstract: We show that monitoring by individuals with preferences regarding the outcome of the supervised task interferes with the task's process: the monitors bias the results in favor of their own preferences. In particular, using an original dataset from the 2011 national elections in Argentina, we exploit a (quasi) natural experiment to show that electoral observers with partisan preferences cause a 1.7% to 7% increase in the vote count of the observers' preferred party. This bias, which appears under various electoral rules, concentrates in municipalities with lower civic capital (Guiso et al. (2010)) and weakens the accountability role of elections.

Date: 2014-09-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/rest/api/core/bitstreams ... 80faf9ac4189/content (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Who monitors the monitor? Effect of party observers on electoral outcomes (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cte:werepe:we1419

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UC3M Working papers. Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ana Poveda ().