This text explores elections as instruments of democracy. Focusing on elections in 20 democracies over the last 25 years, it examines the differences between two visions of democracy - the majoritarian vision and the proportional influence vision.

This text explores elections as instruments of democracy. Focusing on elections in 20 democracies over the last 25 years, it examines the differences between two visions of democracy - the majoritarian vision and the proportional influence vision.

This book offers the first comparative monograph on the management of elections. The book defines electoral management as a new, inter-disciplinary area and advances a realist sociological approach to study it. A series of new, original frameworks are introduced, including the PROSeS framework, which can be used by academics and practitioners around the world to evaluate electoral management quality. A networked governance approach is also introduced to understand the full range of collaborative actors involved in delivering elections, including civil society and the international community. Finally, the book evaluates some of the policy instruments used to improve the integrity of elections, including voter registration reform, training and the funding of elections. Extensive mixed methods are used throughout including thematic analysis of interviews, (auto-)ethnography, comparative historical analysis and, cross-national and national surveys of electoral officials. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners interested and involved in electoral integrity and elections, and more broadly to comparative politics, public administration, international relations and democracy studies. Chapters 1 and 4 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The constitutions of many countries guarantee the right to vote for all citizens. However, in reality, voters who are outside their home country when elections take place are often disenfranchised because of a lack of procedures enabling them to exercise that right. Voting from Abroad: The International IDEA Handbook examines the theoretical and practical issues surrounding external voting. It provides an overview of external voting provisions in 115 countries and territories around the world, including a map illustrating the regional spread.

This edited volume presents the first comprehensive analysis of recall processes which have spread globally since the end of the Cold War, and which are now re-configuring the political dynamics of electoral democracy. Drawing on the expertise of country experts, the book provides a coherent and theoretically informed framework for mapping and evaluating this fast-evolving phenomenon. While the existing literature on the subject has so far focused on isolated single-country studies, the collection brings recall experiments to centre stage as it relates them to current crises in the traditional variants of representative democracy. It explains why the spread of recall innovations is set to continue, and to pass a threshold from inattention to urgent engagement. The authors further provide original insights into the rationale for recall, as well as guidance on minimising the accompanying risks.

An engrossing analysis of the pseudo-democratic methods employed by despots around the world to retain control Contrary to what is commonly believed, authoritarian leaders who agree to hold elections are generally able to remain in power longer than autocrats who refuse to allow the populace to vote. In this engaging and provocative book, Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas expose the limitations of national elections as a means of promoting democratization, and reveal the six essential strategies that dictators use to undermine the electoral process in order to guarantee victory for themselves. Based on their firsthand experiences as election watchers and their hundreds of interviews with presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, election officials, and conspirators, Cheeseman and Klaas document instances of election rigging from Argentina to Zimbabwe, including notable examples from Brazil, India, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States—touching on the 2016 election. This eye-opening study offers a sobering overview of corrupted professional politics, while providing fertile intellectual ground for the development of new solutions for protecting democracy from authoritarian subversion.

6 Party Government and Responsiveness: James A. Stimson