Strategies of Election Rigging: Trade-Offs, Determinants, and Consequences

Zhaotian Luo and Arturas Rozenas

Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2018, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-28

Abstract: Ideally, elections should peacefully allocate political power and remove bad leaders from office. We study how the electoral mechanism performs when the government can rig elections by manipulating the electoral process ex ante and by falsifying election returns ex post. The extent to which elections contribute to peace and accountability depends on how incumbents trade-off between the two strategies given the institutional constraints. An option to falsify election results without being exposed increases the risk of conflict even if that option is not realized in equilibrium, but an option to use ex-ante manipulation reduces the risk of conflict. Imposing constraints on one strategy of election rigging when the incumbent can substitute it with another leads to perverse trade-offs: Constraining ex-ante manipulation raises the risk of conflict, but may improve accountability. Making ex-post falsification more difficult to hide improves the prospect of peace, but worsens accountability.

Keywords: Election fraud; Manipulation; Conflict; Peace; Accountability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00016095 (application/xml)

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:now:jlqjps:100.00016095

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Quarterly Journal of Political Science from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().