Pippa Norris

Harvard University | Harvard · Harvard Kennedy School of Government

Can parties such as the Swedish Democrats, the Jobbik Movement for a Better Hungary, the UK Independence Party and the Italian Lega Nord all be classified consistently as part of the same family? Part I of this study summarizes the conceptual framework arguing that the traditional post-war Left-Right cleavage in the electorate and party competition...

This concluding article begins by considering the reasons behind the growing demand for policy-relevant comparative research into the institutional structures and processes of electoral management. It then outlines the theoretical framework used in this special issue – distinguishing the structure, capacities, and ethos of electoral management – an...

Polls report that, contrary to the evidence, one quarter of Americans believe that millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 elections. What explains these types of beliefs? This article tests the predictors of public evaluations of electoral integrity in the 2016 American Presidential election, as measured by judgements about the fairness of...

Cambridge Core - Political Sociology - Cultural Backlash - by Pippa Norris

Doubts about the legitimacy of the 2016 US elections continue to reverberate and deepen partisan mistrust in America. A perfect storm followed Republican allegations of fake news and massive voter fraud, Democratic complaints of voter suppression and gerrymandering, discontent with the Electoral College’s awarding of victory to a presidential candi...

Doubts about electoral integrity, whether true or false, can undermine faith in the legitimacy of the democratic process. We investigate the reasons for such doubts in the case of the 2016 Federal elections in Australia. A three-wave panel survey of the electorate established that one third of Australians believed (falsely) that the outcome was fra...

Today a general mood of pessimism surrounds Western efforts to strengthen elections and democracy abroad. If elections are often deeply flawed or even broken in many countries around the world, can anything be done to fix them? To counter the prevailing ethos, Pippa Norris presents new evidence for why programs of international electoral assistance...

Political trust – of citizens in government, parliament or political parties – has been centre stage in political science for more than half a century, reflecting ongoing concerns about the legitimacy of representative democracy. This Handbook offers the first truly global perspective on political trust and integrates the conceptual, theoretical, m...

Do formal electoral systems determine how far contests meet international standards of electoral integrity? This question touches on some classic debates in the literature seeking to understand the reasons underlying electoral reforms and the effects of these changes. To examine these issues, the first part of this chapter develops the conceptual f...

This chapter develops the book’s central theoretical framework, which identifies three alternative channels of accountability for electoral-management bodies (EMBs)—the core administrative agencies charged with running elections. It shows that channels of accountability flow upward from EMBs toward the international community and, horizontally, out...

Recent years have seen resurgent interest in the potential capacity of transparency—the public availability of information—to improve democratic governance. Timely, accurate, granular, and freely available information is generally regarded as intrinsically valuable, as well as having many instrumental benefits. In development, transparency and acco...

This concluding chapter looks at the links connecting transparency, accountability, and compliance. In particular, it considers an ideal model of electoral accountability. Yet it is unclear whether dissatisfaction with the conduct of elections translates into voting preferences at the ballot box, and there are many conditions under which this ideal...

The Electoral Integrity Project's "Year in Elections Report 2015" report covers 180 national parliamentary and presidential contests held from mid-2012 to end-2015 in 139 countries worldwide, including 54 national elections during 2015. Elections around the world are often manipulated through vote rigging and corruption, intimidation, and violenc...

The region has been holding competitive elections in the last years. But, have all those elections been held with the same electoral integrity? If there have been problems, which are those? Are there common problems to the region or are they similar to those of the rest of the world? Is there any pattern in the elections? How do we know it? Under w...

From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe the world has witnessed a rising tide of contentious elections ending in heated partisan debates, court challenges, street protests, and legitimacy challenges. In some cases, disputes have been settled peacefully through legal appeals and electoral reforms. In the worst cases, however, disputes have triggered bloodshed...

Political communication is an interactive process concerning the transmission of information among politicians, the news media, and the public. The process operates downward from governing institutions toward citizens, horizontally in linkages among political actors, and also upward from public opinion toward authorities.

In many countries, polling day ends with disputes about ballot-box fraud, corruption, and flawed registers. Which claims are legitimate? And which are false complaints from sore losers? This report by the Electoral Integrity Project, based at Harvard and the University of Sydney, evaluates the quality of elections held around the world. Based on a...

Is there a link between feelings of existential insecurity and the strength of religious values? Previous work suggests such a relationship, but proxy measures of insecurity have been limited to noisy aggregate-level indicators, such as each society’s level of per capita GDP. This chapter addresses these issues. We summarize the theory of existenti...

Unfortunately too often elections around the globe are deeply flawed or even fail. What triggers these problems? In this second volume of her trilogy on electoral integrity, Pippa Norris compares structural, international, and institutional accounts as alternative perspectives to explain why elections fail to meet international standards. The book...

Achieving gender equality is a challenge for all states-but particularly for those in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The Arab Human Development Report (UNDP 2006) highlights the multiple ways that gender equality in the region continues to lag behind the rest of the world. One of the most difficult challenges concerns elected office; wome...

Many contentious elections end in disputes about alleged fraud, irregularities, and malpractices. How do we know when these claims are valid and when they are false complaints from sore losers? This article describes a new dataset developed by the Electoral Integrity Project. Based on a survey of election experts, the research provides new evidence...

Gender equality in elected office has become a commitment of national governments and international organizations around the globe. To date, much of the discussion has revolved around electoral gender quotas – policies that set aside seats in political assemblies for women or require that political parties nominate a certain percentage of female ca...

A rapidly-growing research agenda shared by scholars and applied policy analysts is beginning to explore three questions: when do elections meet standards of electoral integrity? When do they fail to do so? And what can be done to mitigate these problems? To address these issues, Part 1 in this paper outlines the concept of electoral integrity, pro...

Drawing upon theories of the diffusion of global norms, this study addresses two issues: is there a shared consensus among experts about standards of electoral integrity? And do evaluations by elites reflect ‘Western/American’ values, or do they coincide with the judgments of ordinary people living in diverse cultures, suggesting the existence of i...

Many malpractices generate flawed elections which fail to meet international standards of electoral integrity, including issues such as fraud, malpractice, vote-rigging, ballot-stuffing, and voter suppression. Determining when, where, and why elections succeed or fail is a matter of growing concern for the international community—yet to date schola...

Does belonging to churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, and sects directly strengthen activism in faith-based charities and philanthropic work? Does it reinforce broader dimension of social engagement in the local community, such as membership in nonreligious associations, exemplified by the Rotary club, YMCA, school boards, and social networks?...

The main purpose of this article is to present a brief review of the literature concerning the political recruitment and offer some empirical criteria for analysis. From a integrated perspective, we draw a framework that stablish the relationship between the social structure and the political institutions. The model of offer and demand was used to...

Scholars continue to debate what citizens know about politics, whether ordinary people lack the capacity to make rational and informed choices in a democracy, and what voters learn from election campaigns. One common prism to understand these issues focuses upon the role of ‘knowledge gaps’, suggesting that any adult learning from the media will be...

When international observers criticize the quality of elections, do these expert evaluations reflect ‘Western/American’ values? Or are there universal global norms of electoral integrity and malpractice which are shared by ordinary people living in diverse cultures? To consider these issues, Part I of this paper unpacks the core concept of electora...

Since the end of the Cold War, security studies have broadened to take into account a wide range of non-military threats ranging from poverty to environmental concerns rather than just national defence. Security scholars, backed by international organizations and a growing number of national governments, have developed the concept of 'human securit...

This book is the first in a planned trilogy by Pippa Norris on challenges of electoral integrity to be published by Cambridge University Press. Unfortunately too often elections around the globe are deeply flawed or even fail. Why does this matter? It is widely suspected that such contests will undermine confidence in elected authorities, damage vo...

Since the end of the Cold War, security studies have broadened to take into account a wide range of non-military threats ranging from poverty to environmental concerns rather than just national defense. Security scholars, backed by international organizations and a growing number of national governments, have developed the concept of Human Security...

Does democratic governance expand wealth and prosperity? There is no consensus about this issue despite the fact that for more than half a century, rival theories about the regime-growth relationship have been repeatedly tested against the empirical evidence, using a variety of cases, models and techniques. To consider the issues, Part I of this pa...

Photoluminescence and photoluminescence excitation spectroscopies are utilized to study excitons in GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells (QW's) fabricated using MBE on MOCVD grown GaAs/Si. The experimental results are understood in terms of the biaxial tension of approximately 3 kbar present in the plane of growth for both the QW's and the GaAs buffer. An imp...

Many fear that democracies are suffering from a legitimacy crisis. This book focuses on ‘democratic deficits’, reflecting how far the perceived democratic performance of any state diverges from public expectations. Pippa Norris examines the symptoms by comparing system support in more than fifty societies worldwide, challenging the pervasive claim...

Electoral reform is largely regarded as an elite-level issue, dominated by partisan interests, where citizens are usually marginalised and powerless. This perspective may help to explain what specific reforms are enacted, but it lacks the capacity to account for when and why successful reforms are raised on the policy agenda. The first section ofth...

The Fate of Young Democracies. By KapsteinEthan B. and ConverseNathan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 212p. $90.00 cloth, $29.99 paper. - Volume 8 Issue 1 - Pippa Norris

The benchmark First and Second Editions of Comparing Democracies represented essential guides to the global study of elections. Reflecting recent developments in the field, this timely new edition gives an indispensable state-of-the art review of the whole field from the world's leading international scholars. With a completely new thematic introdu...

The notion of a “resource curse” has been most commonly applied in explaining why many countries apparently blessed with abundant reserves of nonrenewable mineral resources, such as Nigerian oil, Democratic Republic of Congo gold, or Sierra Leone diamonds, in fact, are commonly blighted with less transparency and probity, economic stability, econom...

This paper examines the impact of descriptive representation in comparative perspective. The goals are to establish (1) whether descriptive representation mobilizes attitudinal and behavioral indicators of civic engagement; (2) whether the strength of any such relationship differs for women and young people; and (3) whether this relationship is evi...

Why do Arab states lag behind the rest of the world in gender equality? Social structural, cultural, and institutional accounts offer alternative perspectives. This study critiques the ‘petroleum patriarchy’ thesis, presented in Michael Ross’s “Oil, Islam and Women” (2008), which claims that the structure of oil-rich economies directly limit the ro...

To what extent do migrants carry their culture with them, and to what extent do they acquire the culture of their new home? The answer not only has important political implications; it also helps us understand the extent to which basic cultural values are enduring or malleable; and whether cultural values are traits of individuals or are attributes...

Societies around the world have experienced a flood of information from diverse channels originating beyond local communities and even national borders, transmitted through the rapid expansion of cosmopolitan communications. For more than half a century, conventional interpretations, Norris and Inglehart argue, have commonly exaggerated the potenti...

This article examines some of the key research questions and the recent theoretical advances that seek to explain the activism gap. It focuses on the feminist challenges to the conventional study of political behaviour. The article is divided into five main sections. The first and second sections look at the reasons for scholarship growth on gender...

This article discusses political activism and provides an overview that highlights four key themes that have emerged during the last ten years. The first two themes are the growing recognition of the importance of the institutional context of formal rules for electoral turnout and the widespread erosion of party membership in established democracie...

Nomination: Second-order elections revisited by Pippa Norris, p.109 Reflections: European elections as member state second-order elections revisited by Karlheinz Reif, p.115

To date the Internet has apparently had limited impact on changing “politics as usual” in election campaigns. Parties often fail to make imaginative use of the medium, while relatively few people use it to acquire information about an election. However, while it may be the case that only political activists use the Internet to acquire information a...

Is democratic governance good for economic prosperity? Does it accelerate progress towards social welfare and human development? Does it generate a peace-dividend and reduce conflict at home? Within the international community, democracy and governance are widely advocated as intrinsically desirable goals. Nevertheless, alternative schools of thoug...

This study focuses on the capacity of the Internet for strengthening political activism. The first part summarizes debates about these issues in the previous literature. This study starts from the premise that political activism is a multidimensional phenomenon and that we need to understand how different channels of participation relate to the soc...

The American Elections This Year Overturned conventional expectations. In March 1991 President Bush — leader of the free world during the fall of the Berlin wall and winner of the Gulf war — seemed invincible. With the troops home in victory parades, Bush's approval rating stood at 88 per cent in Gallup polls. Few thought he could lose against Gove...

The core issue for this study concerns less the social than the political consequences of the rise of knowledge societies; in particular, the capacity of the Internet for strengthening democratic participation and civic engagement linking citizens and government. To consider these issues, Part I summarizes debates about the impact of the Internet o...

This chapter argues that secularization is proceeding apace on both sides of the Atlantic - at different speeds and at different levels. It describes systematic and consistent evidence establishing the variations in religiosity among postindustrial nations, in particular, contrasts between America and Western Europe. It compares and contrasts two a...

The Nolan Committee Has Put Parliament on Trial. Many believe that standards of public life have fallen into disrepute in recent years. The press has seized upon a series of sleaze issues: cash for parliamentary questions, the Scott inquiry into government contracts, undisclosed gifts from lobbyists, the hidden patronage of quango appointments, and...

IN RECENT YEARS QUESTIONS ABOUT THE EXTENT AND nature of gender differences in political participation have proved controversial. Within the literature we can identify three main perspectives. The traditional view, common in the 1950s and 1960s, was that women tended to be less involved and interested in most conventional forms of political life, w...

OWING TO THE GROWTH OF THE GREEN MOVEMENT IN THE 1980S MANY feel that Britain has experienced a cultural revolution on environmental issues. According to conventional wisdom, public opinion has come to reflect a deep-rooted and widespread sense of environmental awareness, with long-term consequences for British politics. Yearley suggests that there...

One concern about reform of the electoral system in the Netherlands is whether this would reduce the proportion of women members in the House of Representatives. What evidence is there for this expectation? This study considers these issues, with the first section summarizing the normative arguments why socially inclusive legislatures are thought t...

Did campaign communications contribute towards changes in voter preferences in the 2005 UK general election through priming, persuasion and mobilization effects? And, if so, which communication channel proved most influential? To examine this topic, Part I summarizes the literature on the impact of campaign communications and develops the theoretic...

This study focuses on the capacity of the Internet for strengthening political activism. The first part summarizes debates about these issues in the previous literature. This study starts from the premise that political activism is a multidimensional phenomenon and that we need to understand how different channels of participation relate to the soc...

Synopsis: This paper seeks to explain the continuing strength of religious values and the vitality of spiritual life in the United States compared with many other rich nations. Part I documents these patterns using a wealth of survey evidence and Part II then considers three alternative explanations of these differences. Religious market theory pos...

The rise in demonstrations activism raises important questions about the causes of this phenomenon, in particular who engages in demonstrations. Three accounts exist in the literature: emphasizing the importance of political disaffection, strategic resource, and context. After comparing rise in protest politics in two dozen older and newer democrac...

Since the mid-seventies, an extensive body of literature has analyzed political activism in Western democracies, utilizing the methods of survey research, historical comparisons, and events analysis to understand the ways that people participate in the public sphere, the processes that lead them to do so, and the consequences of these acts. By cont...

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