Chapter 21: Electoral Corruption

Sarah Birch

Electoral corruption Modern authoritarian and semi-authoritarian states hold elections; even text-book autocracies such as Saudi Arabia and China have recently begun experimenting on a small scale with electoral mechanisms for the choice of public officials. The prevalence of elections is not, however, associated with an equal prevalence of democracy, in the sense that this term is commonly understood in Western political science. The discrepancy between the institution of elections and the reality of democracy can be largely (though not exclusively) traced directly or indirectly to electoral corruption and manipulation. The modern study of electoral corruption takes two principal forms: historical studies of corruption in unreformed electoral systems, and studies of electoral malpractice following (notional) democratization. The historical accounts of electoral corruption have in some cases been carried out by political scientists and in other cases by historians. They tend to be single country case studies employing either qualitative or quantitative ...

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