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Electoral Integrity in Central Europe: an Insight Into the Electoral Rules and Reality
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This dissertation addresses the topic of electoral integrity in three Central European
countries, namely Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary in a period from 1998 to the 2014 parliamentary elections. The main goal of the dissertation is to provide a complex analysis of electoral integrity and its evolution in the countries considered to be consolidated democracies after the democratic transition. The secondary goal is a validation of some other available datasets providing data on the quality of elections. The study focuses on the quality of elections, their problems, differences between the quality of elections on the level of the rules and in practice, longitudinal differences, differences in quality of elections between the countries, and finally differences of the findings from other measurements of the phenomenon. The analysis is based on Sarah Birch’s ‘policy accountability’ model of democracy. Observations are made separately on the level of electoral rules (meta-game) and electoral practice (game). A wide spectrum of various data sources is systematically utilized to describe the quality of elections, as complex as possible. The data are processed by qualitative content analysis, and by bivariate statistics in the validation part. Results present a high quality of elections and their positive evolution in cases of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Hungarian elections evinced a relatively high, stable quality until 2010. Nevertheless, we can observe in a given period the relatively standard, in democratic regimes, common issues of both lower and higher significance, but also cases of quite serious problems which are unexpected in democracy. The study further reveals quite essential association between the quality of electoral framework and behaviour of electoral actors in practice. While a high quality of electoral rules is connected with an even higher quality of elections in practice, a low quality of legal framework is reflected in an even lower quality of elections in practice, as the Hungarian 2014 election illustrates. The findings in this dissertation indicate adequate external validity which further supports relevancy of other available quantitative datasets dealing with the quality of elections.
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The study uses a comparative-historical perspective to examine the practice of state advertising in the Hungarian media by looking at the relevant practices of three governments. Using previous economic and political theoretical assumptions and data on Hungarian state advertising between 2006 and 2017, we argue that state advertising is a powerful tool of political favouritism as well as an instrument of market distortion, censorship and building an uncritical media empire aligned with the government. This practice can be viewed as part of a broader set of instruments deployed by illiberal states and hybrid political regimes to consolidate their hold on power.
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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 fraudulent – a remarkable level of scepticism in an established democracy with a long history of clean and well-run contests. One reason was that many Australians misunderstood their electoral system. Media stories of electoral maladministration also led Australians – especially electoral losers -- to be suspicious and to embrace reforms. The results suggest that officials seeking to restore public confidence should strengthen civic education and improve electoral administration, particularly where the rules of the game are complex.
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. © 2018 Nicholas Cheeseman and Brian Klaas. All rights reserved.
When the European Union was founded, it was assumed that all Member States admitted as consolidated democracies would maintain their constitutional commitments. In recent years, Hungary and Poland have challenged this premise as elected autocratic governments in those countries have captured independent institutions and threatened long-term democracy. The judiciaries of these countries have been hard hit. In this paper, we trace what has happened to the judiciaries in Hungary and Poland, showing how first the constitutional courts and then the ordinary judiciary have been brought under the control of political forces so that there is no longer a separation of law and politics. We also explore why the European Union has so far not been able to stop this process. In the end, the European judiciary, particularly the Court of Justice, is attempting a rescue of national judiciaries, but the results are so far unclear.
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