Comparing Election Management Bodies: Information, Communication and Transparency

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Holly Ann Garnett
Department of Political Science
McGill University
Supervised by Elisabeth Gidengil
Co-supervisor: Dietlind Stolle
Grant received in 2014-2015

Election management bodies (EMBs) are the agencies and government departments tasked with the technical administration of elections, from registering voters to counting ballots. This article presents a new approach to comparing election management bodies (EMBs) in cross-national perspective. It measures their capacity to perform their functions through a content analysis of EMB websites in 99 countries, capturing their provision of information, communication with stakeholders, and transparency with the public. This article then assesses the measurement validity of this new measure of capacity, and conducts a small-scale test to determine whether EMBs that score high do actively communicate with their citizens. An application of this new measure of EMB capacity demonstrates its importance in predicting overall electoral integrity, indicating its importance for future scholarly and policy research.

Presentations

  • Garnet, H.A. (2016). Evaluation Electoral Management, a Pre-APSA Workshop on the Construction and Use of Expert Indicators in the Social Sciences: Challenges of Validity, Reliability and Legitimacy,Communication présentée au American Political Science Association. Philadelphia, PA.

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