Democratic Erosion, Partisanship, and Election Observers: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Travis Curtice and Charles Crabtree

International Interactions, 2024, vol. 50, issue 4, 567-592

Abstract: To what extent do voters support election observation missions (EOMs) monitoring their elections? Building on but departing from prior work, we argue that citizens’ support for election observation missions likely depends on their partisanship. To test our argument, we conduct a survey experiment with a national sample of about 3, 500 Americans in the run-up to the 2020 United States presidential election. Respondents read an adapted news article about the deployment of common interventions in the upcoming election. To test our theoretical expectations, we randomize the partisan source endorsing the interventions. We find that respondents who self-identify as Democrats and Independents/Others are much less likely to support election observers when endorsed by Trump. In addition, Democrats are more likely to support election observers if they read that Biden approves of them. In contrast, Republicans are less likely to support an intervention if they read the same. Our results contribute to ongoing debates about how to promote and defend free elections in backsliding or democratizing countries and, more generally, to the literatures on election observation and public opinion.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03050629.2024.2349922 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:taf:ginixx:v:50:y:2024:i:4:p:567-592

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/GINI20

DOI: 10.1080/03050629.2024.2349922

Access Statistics for this article

International Interactions is currently edited by Michael Colaresi and Gerald Schneider

More articles in International Interactions from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().