Electoral integrity matters: how electoral process conditions the relationship between political losing and political tr
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Electoral integrity matters: how electoral process conditions the relationship between political losing and political trust Marlene Mauk1 Accepted: 1 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This contribution adds a new perspective to the debate on electoral integrity by asking how electoral integrity affects the way in which election results translate into citizen attitudes towards the political system. It introduces a causal mechanism that links political losing to political trust via evaluations of electoral fairness: citizens who voted for the losing camp are more likely to view the electoral process as unfair than citizens who voted for the winning camp, resulting in political distrust. It further suggests that the effects of political losing on political trust depend on the level of electoral integrity. In conditions where the elections were conducted in a free and fair manner, even those who voted for the losing camp have little reason to suspect foul play and therefore political losing should barely affect perceptions of the electoral process. Whenever there are actual indications of electoral malpractice, however, political losers have much more reason to doubt the integrity of the electoral process than those who are content with the outcome of the election. The contribution makes use of a unique dataset that ex-post harmonizes survey data from three cross-national survey projects (Asian Barometer Survey, European Social Survey, Latinobarómetro) and macro-level data from the Varieties-of-Democracy Project to cover 45 democracies in Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. Using multi-level modeling, it finds that political losing indeed decreases political trust indirectly via perceptions of electoral fairness. Confirming its key proposition, the empirical analysis shows that political losing has a weaker effect on political trust in countries where electoral integrity is high. Keywords Political trust · Electoral integrity · Electoral process · Losing · Winning · Democracies · Voting behavior
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1113 5-020-01050-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Marlene Mauk [email protected] 1
GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany
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1 Introduction Electoral integrity is increasingly becoming the topic of both the public debate and political-science research. Typically defined as “agreed upon international conventions and universal standards about elections reflecting global norms applying to all countries worldwide throughout the electoral cycle, including during the pre-electoral period, the campaign, on polling day, and its aftermath,” (Norris 2014, p. 21) electoral integrity lies at the core of democratic procedures. Deficits in electoral integrity can take many forms, such as gerrymandering, media bias, or voter intimidation (cf. Birch 2011; Lehoucq 2003; Norris et al. 2013). While such deficits are ubiqu
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