International election observation has the potential to enhance the integrity of election processes, by deterring and exposing irregularities and fraud.
—Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation and Code of Conduct for International Election Observers, 20051
The most serious incident involved the chairperson of the local election committee reading out the wrong names when the ballot papers were to be put into different piles for the nine candidates. The chairperson was well aware of what she was doing. She was taking votes from Levon Ter-Petrosian and allocating them to the [then-] Prime Minister, Serzh Sarkisian. Election officials tried to hide what they were doing by holding their hands over the ballot papers or by placing them in the middle of the piles so that I could not see them. . . . I noticed that all the election officials were well aware of what they were doing and they felt uneasy when I stood behind them watching the electoral fraud. But that did not prevent them from continuing to do what they had probably already planned, namely to ensure that the sitting prime minister got enough votes so that there would be no need for a second round.
—Monitor in Armenian polling station, 20072
ULTIMATELY INTERNATIONAL MONITORING GROUPS hope to do more than assess elections; they seek to improve them. The previous chapters have shown that monitors do not always provide unbiased information and may sometimes endorse fraudulent elections. This problem makes it even more imperative to consider what benefits international monitors do provide. If there are drawbacks to international monitors in terms of inaccuracy and bias, do they create benefits in terms of improvements in elections? Elections may suffer from at least two ailments. First, politicians may cheat. Second, countries may run elections poorly because they lack capacity and experience. By bearing witness and by offering advice and assistance, monitoring organizations direct their efforts at both problems. Indeed, most monitoring organizations are confident that they deter fraud and improve elections. The Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL) goes so far as to assert that election monitoring has been “proven effective” at deterring fraud.3 But do international election observers actually improve election quality? That is the most elusive, yet also the absolutely central question about election monitoring.
Historically confidence in the ability of monitors to improve elections has been boosted by a series of extraordinary elections for which monitors have received considerable credit. These include the election in Chile 1988 that ended the rule of Augusto Pinochet,4 the first multiparty election in Zambia 1991 that saw a peaceful transfer of power,5 the 1990 election in Nicaragua, where President Daniel Ortega accepted defeat,6 the path-breaking election in South Africa in 1994 that ended decades of apartheid, and the historic rerun of the 2004 election in the Ukraine.
Yet, just as many examples of ineffectiveness can be found in numerous countries where—despite repeated monitoring—elections have not improved. Prominent cases include Angola, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Cameroon, Haiti, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Togo, Uganda, and Uzbekistan. These examples drive home that it is far from given that international election monitoring improves the quality of elections and that skepticism is warranted. Despite efforts to become more professional, monitors still do not present a terribly formidable force. Monitoring an election is an overwhelming task for which most international organizations remain woefully under-resourced. Monitoring a complete election campaign is challenging and requires many kinds of resources and local knowledge that many observer groups lack. Most groups visit only a fraction of polling stations and their patterns of visits are often fairly predictable due to logistics or security. Even for the stations that are visited, monitors cannot be present continuously. Polling officials may be able to give the appearance of propriety until monitors arrive and while monitors are present, only to cheat after they leave. In addition, as noted in previous chapters, international monitors come from many different types of organizations and are of highly varying quality. Several organizations are biased and weak, and may be even less likely to engender respect and motivate any sort of behavioral changes.
Furthermore, whereas it is hard for international actors to pressure countries to undertake any kind of reform, politicians are likely to be particularly reluctant to improve the conduct of elections, because this directly threatens their power. Indeed, for some politicians eliminating cheating may lead to a complete loss of power and rob them of the ability to reap any of the benefits that a stamp of legitimacy or other rewards linked to a clean election might provide.7 These benefits will go to the victors of the elections. Such benefits will therefore mean little to incumbent decision makers who risk losing political power. Given that power is an enormous prize to lose, in extreme cases leading to prosecution or loss of life itself,8 the efforts of international monitors to improve elections are really working against the odds. The notion that one could deploy monitors to just any election and expect improvements is probably misguided. So, it is unsurprising that numerous countries have been monitored several times, but their elections have not improved.
Despite the enormity of the challenge, monitors may be able to improve elections though several different, but complementary, mechanisms. First of all, according to traditional rationalist logic, politicians pursue their own interests in maintaining power; therefore, they respond to changes in their incentive structure. Monitors alter their incentive structure both by raising the cost of cheating and by increasing the benefits of honesty; politicians therefore cheat less because it is in their interests. The expectation of this argument is that if an individual election is monitored, then the likelihood of cheating in that election decreases and the election is therefore more likely to be of higher quality.
Second, according to constructivist logic, politicians behave according to their norms and beliefs; therefore, their behavior may change if their norms and beliefs change. Following this logic, through repeated interactions international monitors may socialize politicians and voters into a set of norms and expectations about elections through persuasion, teaching, and the like. Their advice and assistance may help countries build better institutions and combat entrenched acceptance of fraud as the best way to run elections. Improvements brought through socialization are most likely to materialize only over time as monitors attend a series of elections in a country and repeatedly interact and offer advice.
Drawing on both of these logics, this chapter discusses how international monitors may improve elections and when their efforts may be more likely to succeed or fail. The chapter argues that monitors can indeed improve elections, but their influence is conditioned by domestic and international factors. In reality, therefore, monitors play a reinforcement role by building on existing domestic potential and enhancing the effectiveness of other international leverage. The following chapters and appendixes explore these arguments empirically through both statistical analysis and country case studies.
The most basic rational choice argument is that monitoring improves performance because it changes the incentive structure of those being observed. International relations theory often stresses that the monitoring function of international institutions enhances cooperation by lowering member state incentives to renege on their commitments.9 Similarly, when international monitors observe and report election irregularities they may alter the payoff structure, and thus the behavior, of domestic parties by exposing any fraud. In a quasi-experiment in Armenia, Susan Hyde has demonstrated that polling stations that had some contact with monitors during polling day reported lower votes for the incumbents.10 District-level analysis of a field experiment in Ghana also found that the increase in voter registrations is lower in areas with election observers, indicating that less registration fraud may be occurring when monitors are present.11
Other scholars have argued that the presence of international observers “limits the capacity of incumbents to engage in large-scale fraud.”12 As discussed below, international monitors may increase the cost of cheating in several ways.
One way monitors can increase the cost of cheating is to increase the risk of exposure. But is it harder to cheat when monitors are watching? Certainly the persistent reporting of gross fraud in nearly one-quarter of all election monitoring reports coded for this project shows that despite their limitations monitors are quite capable of discovering cheating. In many of these cases, however, the fraud might well have been exposed in any case. The fact that the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was absent from the 2008 presidential election in Russia did not leave the organization in doubt about the quality of that election, for example. This was partly because other monitoring organizations such as the Council of Europe (COE) maintained a small presence, but it was also because there is a large diplomatic core in Russia, and a fairly open system of information so that the entire world was able to ascertain that Vladimir Putin’s handpicked successor enjoyed unfair advantages of government resources in a variety of ways. Similarly, although international monitors are not present, Western commentators never gave elections in Mubarak’s Egypt a clean bill of health. Some types of manipulations such as preferential media treatment are obvious, whether monitors are present or not. In subtler cases, international monitors may still increase the risk of detection. However, it is even more important that monitors may increase the risk of exposure, because they can call more attention to the fraud than domestic actors, and therefore the fraud becomes more visible.13 For example, in Panama in 1989 the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI) assisted the Catholic Church with a parallel vote tabulation, which revealed government manipulation. President Jimmy Carter, who was working with the NDI/IRI joint mission, drew vast attention by publicly denouncing the official voting results—a fact that helped trigger the subsequent U.S. invasion.14 Similarly, in the wake of the Georgia 2008 election, monitors received extraordinary attention as others sought information about the quality of the election. Indeed, the Carter Center (CC) states that one of the main objectives of election observation is to “demonstrate the international community’s interest and support for elections that meet international standards,”15 and that “international observers can play a critically important supportive role by focusing both international and domestic attention on the process.”16
As the CC statement above suggests, the presence of monitors may not only expose cheating, it may also signal that the international community is placing greater weight on cheating in a given election. The United Nations (UN) declaration notes that “international election observation expresses the interest of the international community in the achievement of democratic elections.”17 Clearly in some cases, however, that “interest” does not translate into consequences. As prior discussions of monitoring in Kenya and Cambodia have revealed, international monitors may be unwilling to actually punish countries for bad elections. Despite such exceptions, monitors may signal that the international community is placing weight on the election and that negative consequences of cheating such as reduced aid or other forms of international pressure may be more likely. Indeed, research has found that regional organizations are more likely to punish electoral misconduct if monitors are present and criticize the elections.18 This is important, because management research has traditionally found the strongest effects of monitoring on behavior occur not simply when cheating is exposed, but when monitoring connects behavior to consequences.19 Monitoring can signal the international community’s concern and underscore the international political will to punish cheating by shaming or ostracizing states or implementing other sanctions.
International monitors send this signal because most monitoring organizations are closely, if indirectly, tied to states. Many monitoring organizations are run by intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). As in other issue areas strong member states often direct the activities of these IGOs20 and so these member states have a significant say in the organizations’ international election monitoring activities. For example, European Union (EU) guidelines note that decisions about monitoring “must be balanced by an EU assessment of whether its global relations with the country concerned and EU general objectives make an EU electoral presence ‘politically useful.’ ”21 The other monitoring organizations are nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that depend greatly on donors,22 which often tend to have state ties. NGOs such as the IRI or the NDI, for example, rely heavily on government funding and may respond to the availability of U.S. government grants issued for monitoring specific countries. Thus, both nongovernmental and intergovernmental monitoring organizations represent international community interests and concerns and thereby increase the international cost of cheating. Not all monitoring missions send equally strong signals of international concern, but in general the presence of international monitors prompts governments to revise their estimate of the international costs upward, lowering their incentives to cheat.
Some states may be concerned about international reactions to their elections because they want to protect their reputations as credible partners in international cooperation.23 As argued in earlier chapters, reputations matter because the international community has linked clean elections to other rewards such as trade and aid. That is, elections have become the subjects of classical conditionality, which of course has been much debated.24 In 1989, the World Bank issued a report linking aid flows to “governance,” defined as “the exercise of political power to manage a nation’s affairs.”25 Good governance became more important to the international donor community, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, whose charter stated that it would only lend to pluralist democracies. For the EU, free and fair elections were a sine qua non entry requirement. After turmoil following elections in Romania and Bulgaria in the early 1990s, the European Parliament (EP) adopted a resolution reminding both countries that economic and technical aid and future relations with the European Community would be conditional on holding free and fair elections. In 1992, the Paris Club donors withdrew more than $70 million in nonhumanitarian aid to Malawi, citing concerns about human rights and democracy.26 Furthermore, research has found that the presence of international election observers makes it more likely that IGOs will react to electoral misconduct and that negative reports by observers make punitive actions more likely.27 Thus, the increased international cost of exposure is very real.
The exposure of cheating by international monitors may increase domestic costs. Research on the domestic factors that contribute to democratization highlights, inter alia, growth of political parties, civil society, education, and economic development.28 These factors increase the societal demand for democratic governance and raise the capacity of citizens to challenge authority.29 Subsequently, election cheating grows costlier. As opposition gains strength, manipulated elections become competitions not just over votes, but also struggles to undermine antidemocratic institutions.30 When these domestic events build, monitors are not necessary to transition to free elections; many well-established democracies transitioned without the assistance of monitors. However, as discussed in Chapter 2, pressures on governments to allow international monitors often increase along with these other domestic factors.31
When international monitors are present, they can raise domestic costs of cheating by reinforcing domestic opposition in several ways. First, by holding press conferences and meeting with domestic actors, monitors increase citizen attention to cheating. Second, they can provide a third-party source of information on the election conduct, which may be more convincing for some citizens. Third, if domestic parties want to protest cheating but are uncertain of their success, criticism by international monitors can help overcome their coordination problem,32 bolster their confidence in international support and thus boost their resolve. Thus, declaring elections fraudulent can be a powerful act. The recent regime changes in Georgia, Ukraine, and Serbia were all sparked by fraudulent national elections, which were followed by strong international criticism based on the assessment of election monitors. Earlier regime changes in Panama in 1989 and the Philippines in 1986 were also facilitated by denouncement by monitors, and in the case of the Philippines, by an extensive domestic network. As an important factor driving such changes Michael McFaul highlights, among others, “an ability quickly to drive home the point that voting results were falsified.”33 Whether these pressures are sufficient to make cheating too risky naturally depends on the complex domestic balance of power. Governments whose power is precarious and whose hold on the domestic apparatus for repression is slipping may find cheating a higher-risk strategy in the company of international monitors.
Decreasing incentives for cheating is the natural flipside of increasing the incentives for honesty. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that international monitors may also concretely increase the benefits of holding clean elections by playing a verification role. As Chapter 2 argued, many governments in the early 1990s intended to run clean elections and invited monitors to verify that they indeed did so. Although these countries already wished to run clean elections, international monitors may have increased their incentive to do so. It may be that without the ability to gain verification of a clean election, politicians would lose the incentive to behave honestly, because the honesty would be in any case questioned and therefore devalued. For example, in the pivotal plebiscite in Chile in 1988 the government would have preferred not to invite outside observers,34 but General Fernando Matthei summed up the dilemma: “If the government’s candidate wins, everyone will say it was fraud. If he loses everyone will say it was a fair election. So it is more in our interests than anyone else’s, to be able to show that it was an absolutely fair election.”35 Thus, the availability of a validation scheme may change behavior. For example, if a system exists to certify organic foods, more growers who have wanted to grow organic foods may decide to do so. Similarly, the existence of monitoring may make governments willing to hold clean elections because a clean election backed by international monitors carries greater value. International monitors have played such a verification role in several elections where the polarized environment might otherwise not have allowed the victor a governing mandate.36 Examples include South Korea in 1987, Bulgaria in 1990, Mozambique in 1994, and Mexico in 1994. Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian Authority in 2006 would likely have been labeled fraudulent without several international observer groups acknowledging its validity. The IRI reports that in 2004 in Macedonia, the “IRI’s observation mission and the publicity it received substantially contributed to the post-election acceptance of the results, despite vocal calls by the opposition for invalidation or annulment of the results.”37 Similarly, the EU observation report on Guatemala’s 2003 election argued that the mission enhanced public confidence and deterred threats to the political process.38 In a more concrete example, in its final report of the Guyana 1992 election, the CC argued that the violence at the election commission building had nearly caused the collapse of the entire election, but that it was averted partly because the international observers from the council and the Commonwealth Secretariat (CS) boosted the Guyanese people’s confidence in the electoral process.39 The validity that observers can bring to an election may thus give politicians an added incentive to compete fairly, and may broaden acceptance of the results. In sum, there are some reasons to accept the standard rational choice argument that international monitoring increases the cost of cheating and that in response politicians have an incentive to cheat less.
The wide range of activities of monitoring organizations described in Chapter 2 makes it clear that monitoring organizations seek to build capacity and improve administrative processes just as much as they seek to directly deter outright fraud.40 This is point the UN declaration also drives home when it asserts that monitoring aims to build confidence and capacity “by providing recommendations for improving electoral processes.”41 Monitoring organizations also undertake a host of activities to build capacity and interact with politicians, officials, and citizens about elections.
Most monitoring efforts aim not simply to deter overt cheating in a given election, but also to improve the structure of the electoral environment. This is why many organizations invest considerable time on the ground. Analyzing data until and including the year 2004, more than half of monitored elections had at least one pre-election visit by an organizational delegation. Furthermore, in about 40 percent of elections at least one organization arrived a month or more in advance. In these cases, monitors may suggest and even help implement very specific changes that make it harder to cheat or improve the quality of the election. For example, international monitors can expose (and thus enable election administrators to correct) administrative shortcomings that might otherwise lead to massive disenfranchisement or some other electoral ill. In this vein, international monitors provided information about the unintended, but problematic placement of voting centers to the Haitian electoral commission in the run-up to the 2006 election, and this allowed the electoral commission to make necessary adjustments.
Furthermore, international election monitors often include long lists of recommendations in their reports to call attention to problems in the legal and administrative framework for elections and make concrete suggestions for how to address them. For example, monitors may note that the current law inadequately addresses election finance issues and suggest a process of overview. Or they may recommend that a country adopt a particular form of voter identification, or revise the ballot counting or tabulation system. They may also make specific legal recommendations about the electoral system itself, for example, about the selection and composition of the electoral commission, or ways to eliminate systematic disenfranchisement of certain voters. Often they also make recommendations to improve the transparency of the election process or to achieve a smoother administration of the balloting. Such recommendations may influence domestic actors either because they learn new norms and behaviors, or because they underscore precisely what the international community expects from them if they want the international community to endorse their elections. Either way, the recommendations may provide impetus for behavioral change.
Monitors may help improve election quality through a variety of mechanisms designed to build capacity and skills and demonstrate electoral norms and behaviors. For example, voter education and extensive discussion with politicians can help domestic actors improve the administration of elections. The training of domestic observers directly educates local actors about best monitoring practices and it also inculcates a set of norms about election administration. Many international monitoring organizations have a history of working closely with domestic observers and in some cases fostering their development. For example, in Mexico, international monitors facilitated domestic monitoring through intensive interaction and by exposing domestic actors to election monitoring techniques. Practical assistance on the day of election or during the formation of the voter registry or other practical elements of the election also demonstrates proper methods. The presence of observers at polling stations may alert voters to the problems of group voting, or impress upon them that political endorsements should not be present near or in the polling station.
These long-term activities may alter the domestic conditions for elections in several ways. As noted, theories of socialization and learning predict that long-term activities of international election monitors can help facilitate behavioral changes and socialize domestic actors to a number of important norms and practices surrounding the holding of regular elections.42 The interaction provides opportunities for persuasion and for active demonstration of roles that domestic actors should play in proper elections. Indeed, the activities of monitors fit the three dominant mechanisms in Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink’s explanation for the spread of emergent norms: socialization, institutionalization, and demonstration.43 Election monitors certainly seek to socialize and demonstrate, in particular, and when making specific recommendations for legal changes or changes to the electoral commissions or administrative procedures, they also seek to institutionalize these changes in domestic law.
However, these activities can also influence the domestic environment in ways that alter the incentives of the domestic actors. Building capacity and educating voters empower citizens to stand up to fraud. The recommendations by monitors may influence domestic actors either because they learn new norms and behaviors, or because they underscore precisely what the international community expects from them if they want the international community to endorse their elections. Furthermore, some of these activities are less threatening to the incumbent partly because they are introduced gradually and may not immediately threaten the current power holders. In this setting, incumbents can earn praise and possible rewards for allowing some electoral reforms, while still hoping to hold on to office and enjoy the fruits of the increased legitimacy.
In sum, the point here is not to argue whether the long-term engagement of monitors changes the behavior of politicians by influencing their beliefs or by changing their incentives. The point is that the long-term engagement of international monitors may be able to improve the quality of elections in various ways as indeed some existing research suggests.44 However, some of these mechanisms may take time to work, as monitors return for several elections and reinforce and follow up on their message.
The above discussion developed several arguments for why monitored elections may be better than nonmonitored elections, and why countries with repeated engagement from monitors may improve their election quality over time. However, several factors are likely to affect whether monitors indeed have this effect.
First, given the discussion in Chapters 3 and 4 about the variance in the quality of election monitoring organizations, one might not expect all organizations to influence elections. Given the mechanisms discussed in this chapter, more credible organizations have several advantages. They should have a higher probability of exposing and criticizing fraud and they should therefore deter cheating more. When they validate an election outcome, high-quality monitors may be more credible and thus increase the incentive for honesty. Similarly, high-quality organizations should be expected to engage more in efforts to socialize domestic actors and therefore they should be expected to influence election processes more. Thus, high-quality organizations should be more likely to improve the quality of elections in a country.
Second, there are some basic conditions under which monitors should not be expected to have any effect at all, because the mechanisms outlined above have no grounds for operating. For example, because they lack competition and choice, single-party states cannot by definition run clean elections, whether monitors are present or not. Thus, international monitoring should not be expected to deter cheating in these countries. Furthermore, international monitoring organizations should not be expected to influence the quality of elections in highly democratic countries, since these countries already have a strong tradition of holding clean elections. This expectation is also consistent with the fact that other forms of restraint on regimes, such as human rights law, primarily influence transitional states.45 As already discussed in Chapter 2, it is therefore also extremely rare for monitors even to attend elections in single-party states, and quite rare for them to attend elections in well-established democracies, although the OSCE and some other organizations have begun to send some lighter missions to democracies.46 Thus, if international monitors improve elections, this effect should be expected only in multiparty states that are not well-established democracies.
Third, because international monitoring enters the domestic political environment, the domestic factors that influence democratization should also affect the opportunity structure monitors have to influence the quality of elections. Here, several chapters could be added to the book about the conditions for democratization, especially since many of these conditions remain debated.47 However, most relevant for international monitoring is probably Thomas Carothers’s “moving train” argument: Democracy promotion can speed up democratization only when the domestic train is already moving forward.48 For example, the mechanism of increased domestic costs discussed above is more likely to operate in countries where political plurality and choice are gaining strength. External actors are unlikely to influence countries that are stagnated or regressing in their democratic transitions, or have never embarked on any transition. Furthermore, politicians in countries moving toward democracy are more likely to be open to learning and adopting new behaviors. Indeed, the literature on socialization suggests that countries in transition should be particularly amenable to the advice of external actors.49 As Ambassador Christian Strohal, director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, said in an interview, the political will must exist for observers to be able to help.50
Fourth, if politicians are motivated by their self-interest in keeping power, progress is likely to suffer if parties cannot transcend winner-take-all politics, where those who do not win the elections completely lose influence in the political structures.51 In polarized majoritarian political systems where losing even by a small margin means losing any and all representation, losing politicians have little hope that the winners will accommodate their preferences. Thus, it is harder for outsiders to influence domestic conditions when parties perceive politics as a game of all or nothing.52 International monitors will therefore be less effective under conditions of such winner-take-all politics. This will be even more the case when the fight for power turns violent as, for example, in Kenya.53 Thus, despite numerous visits by monitors, major election problems have persisted in countries such as Algeria, Burkina Faso, Fiji, Malawi, Sri Lanka, and others.
Fifth, as in other reform areas, democratic transitions also depend greatly on domestic capacity, not only on will. This is true in financial reforms promoted by international financial institutions,54 and in the international influences on environmental compliance issues.55 Thus, if international monitors can assist in the building of capacity, this may be a valuable contribution to improving the quality of elections. However, this may be a catch-22 situation: Initial low levels of capacity may also present barriers to monitor influence. Countries with little logistical and administrative capacity may find it more difficult to follow recommendations and monitors may find it harder to teach them new electoral norms if the domestic capacity to implement elementary processes is strained. Thus, in low-capacity countries, international monitors could be part of the means by which capacity grows, but in these countries changes should generally be slower and require more long-term engagement.
Sixth, because of the international signaling mechanism discussed above, international election monitors should enjoy greater influence when they have more leverage over a country. This is the classic conditionality argument.56 The more the international monitors are connected to organizations that countries seek to join, or to countries that serve as important donors, the more eager domestic actors should be to make a favorable impression and the more receptive they therefore should be to international monitors and their advice.57 Criticisms of conditionality have revealed several causes of its failure,58 and therefore the presence of leverage need not always translate into concessions in election conduct. Several conditions may interfere. As argued earlier, incumbents who stand to lose power completely if they decrease cheating or reform the electoral framework in ways that diminish their control are less likely to cooperate. Furthermore, factors that compromise the will of external actors to actually punish a country for cheating will weaken the monitors’ ability to increase the cost of cheating.59 For example, even if monitors are critical, important donors are less likely to actually punish important countries.60 In addition, other strong states may counter the influence of conditionality by acting as so-called black knights.61 Yet, if these conditions do not interfere, then it still holds that the presence of leverage and conditionality such as EU membership, for example, or foreign aid will create conditions for influence that are more favorable than situations where the international community has little to offer. The other side of the coin, of course, is that the removal of such conditionality may produce backsliding.62
This chapter has drawn on both rationalist and constructivist theories to argue that international monitors can indeed improve elections, but that several domestic and international factors affect their influence. In reality, therefore, monitors play a reinforcement role by building on existing domestic potential and enhancing the effectiveness of other international leverage.
TABLE 6.1
Summary of mechanisms, observable implications, and modifying factors
Table 6.1 summarizes the argument. International election monitors can improve the quality of elections through two main mechanisms: Monitors can alter incentives by increasing the risk of exposure, signaling increasing international cost, increasing domestic cost, or increasing the incentives for honesty. Monitors can also alter the domestic conditions by recommending legal and institutional changes, and by teaching new norms and building capacity and skills that reinforce good electoral practices.
However, several conditions are likely to modify the influence of monitors: (1) High-quality monitors should be more effective than low quality monitors; (2) international monitors should only be effective in multiparty states that are not fully established democracies; (3) international monitors should be more effective in countries already moving toward democracy than in countries that are stagnated or regressing in their democratic transitions, or have never embarked on any transition; (4) international monitors should be less effective in violent winner-take-all politics; (5) the effect of international monitors should be rarer and slower when domestic capacity is very low; and (6) international election monitors should be more effective when they are connected with organizations or donor states that have something to offer a country and clearly make that offering conditional on electoral quality.
The following chapters examine the effect of monitors on the quality of elections as well as the conditions that may modify their influence. Chapter 7 examines whether there is a relationship between the presence of monitors and election quality in individual elections. Chapter 8 then looks at election quality in countries where monitors are present for several elections over time to explore whether monitors are able to gradually change conditions in these countries to improve their elections and whether monitoring has long-term and enduring effects.