The two sides of state capacity: how much is necessary to manipulate an election?

Jessica Fortin
GESIS Leibniz Institut fr Sozialwissenschaften
Postfach 12 21 55
D 68072 Mannheim
Germany
+49.621.1246-514
jessica.fortin@gesis.org

Work in progress; please do not quote without permission

Abstract
While effective state capacity can reasonably be considered a necessary condition for
democratization, strong states do not automatically produce democratic regimes, nor do they
guarantee their survival. Far from being sufficient conditions for democracy, strong or
capable states are also thought to be indispensable for the maintenance of stable autocratic
rule (Way, 2005). Indeed, most literature linking levels of corruption or state capacity and
democracy have found J-shaped, or curvilinear relationships between democracy and
administrative performance. Not only does the establishment of nondemocratic rule require an
important level of elite organization and state capacity, central control and elite cohesion are
also required to eliminate uncertainty during elections, to ensure compliance and prevent
opposition activity across a wide territory. The present paper proposes to focus on this aspect
and put to the test the hypothesis that a certain amount of state capacity is needed to engage in
effective electoral malpractice, using various indicators of state capacity and the data from
several sources such as Electoral Malpractice and Electoral Manipulation in New and SemiDemocracies dataset (Birch 2010), the Quality of Elections Data (QED) (Kelley, 2010,
Kelley, 2012, Kelley and Kolev, 2010), The National Elections across Democracy and
Autocracy (NELDA) (Hyde and Marionov, 2011).
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1. INTRODUCTION
The connection between a strong state and the establishment of democratic institutions
is becoming a well established finding (Bunce, 2000, Fortin, 2012, Fukuyama, 2004, Hashim,
2005, Hendley, 1997, Holmes, 1997, Huber et al., 1999, 1999, p. 2, Linz, 1996, O'Donnell,
1993, Przeworski, 1995, Roberts and Sherlock, 1999, Sharlet, 1998, Suleiman, 1999, Tilly,
2007, Wang, 1999). While effective state capacity can reasonably be considered a necessary
condition for democratization, strong states do not automatically produce democratic regimes,
nor do they guarantee their survival. Far from being sufficient conditions for democracy,
strong or capable states are also thought to be indispensable for the maintenance of stable
autocratic rule (Way, 2005). The establishment of nondemocratic rule also requires an
important level of elite organization and state capacity to eliminate uncertainty during
elections, to ensure compliance and prevent opposition activity across a wide territory. But
does electoral fraud really hinge on a strong state? What kind of state infrastructures must be
at the disposal of leaders to use tools related to election fraud to win elections?
The present paper proposes to put to the test the hypothesis that a certain amount of
state capacity is needed to engage in effective electoral malpractice, using various indicators
of infrastructural and coercive state capacity as well as figures from the Quality of Elections
Data (QED) (Kelley, 2010, Kelley, 2012, Kelley and Kolev, 2010), The National Elections
across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) (Hyde and Marionov, 2011), and the Electoral
Malpractice Project (Birch, 2009). The hypotheses developed and tested in this paper propose
two opposing mechanisms through which state capacity influences the quality of elections:
through infrastructural state capacity and coercive state capacity. Seemingly these two aspects
of state capacity operate according to opposing logics and affect different dimensions of the
electoral process. The paper focuses on the manipulation of the electoral process in general,
but also when disaggregated in different categories such as unfair media coverage, incomplete
or manipulated voter lists, falsification in ballot tabulation, vote-buying, as well as voter and
candidate intimidation.
Using 26 post-communist countries over the period 1989-2009, the main empirical
finding is that electoral fraud is more likely in countries where infrastructural state capacity is
weak; however the analyses also suggest that there is not a single answer to the question of
what causes electoral malpractice. Structures underlying electoral malpractice vary by the
type of electoral fraud under consideration; the effects of the independent variables
considered in this paper vary substantially from voter and opposition intimidation, votebuying, electoral list manipulation and ballot tempering. The remainder of the paper proceeds
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as follows. The first part outlines the theoretical underpinning of the paper and the hypotheses
developed. The second section presents the methodology employed and details the variables
and measurements. The third part presents the empirical findings. I conclude with a
discussion of the results and implications for future research.

2. ELECTORAL MISCONDUCT IN POSTCOMMUNIST COUNTRIES

While the majority of countries in the world cannot be considered liberal democracies,
almost all hold regular elections to fill the positions of heads of government and state. As
reported by Bunce and Wolchik (2011), by 2002, only eight countries out of 190 did not hold
elections. Elections have become a standard feature of both democratic and authoritarian rule.
What sets countries apart is the quality of the electoral contests they hold: how inclusive (who
is allowed to vote?), pluralistic (who is allowed to run?), competitive (who it allowed to
win?), and open (presence or absence of repression) electoral contests are determines how
democratic access to power is (Schedler, 2006). Given unequal advancements in democracy
in former communist countries, there is considerable variation in the quality of elections
taking place. While elections in East Central Europe have been mostly free and fair from the
beginning of the 1990s, competition has remained severely constrained in most former Soviet
republics. In the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in particular,
power holders have made use of a wide range of illegitimate tools to attempt to hold on to
power since 1991; from the more obvious ballot stuffing and vote-buying, to the more subtle
opposition intimidation tactics and unfair media coverage.
Electoral malpractice, or fraud, defined as clandestine efforts to shape election
results (Lehoucq, 2003) is widespread among post-communist countries. A large body of
evidence accumulated by observation missions such as the OSCE indicate that current
incumbents use unfair techniques to increase their vote shares on a regular basis. In all
national legislative and presidential elections that took place in 28 former communist
countries between 1989 and 2004, only 26 percent of contests were free of political and
administrative problems or malpractice in the pre-election period, with regard to the legal
framework, or the integrity of the process on the election day itself according to the data base
Quality of Election Data (QED) (Kelley, 2010) (figures presented in table 1). Alternatively,
close to 50 percent of national elections held between 1989 and 2004 presented moderate to
major problems. The figures presented in Table 1 show just how prevalent electoral
malpractice is among postcommunist countries.
[TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE]
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Despite the frequency of incidents linked to fraud across elections, trends in electoral
manipulation do not seem to display a time dependency. Figure 1 presents the percentage of
election fraud between 1989 and 2004. The vertical axis measures the percentage of elections
in a given year that were judged ambiguous or unacceptable by the U.S. State Department
(reported in the QED data); this number varies from a single election in 1989 to 18 elections
in 2000. Figure 1 does not exhibit a clear development towards more, or less episodes of
electoral manipulation over time, when all categories of problems cited above are taken
together. When considered alone, the longevity of regimes does not affect the likelihood of
electoral malpractice in a particular direction. Under such conditions, it appears that the
incentives ruling elites face to shape the results of elections through extra-legal means do not
change as state institutions become more stable, and (authoritarian) power holders become
more established and secure.
[FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE]
One of the reasons explaining the frequent use of electoral manipulation by
incumbents is that these tools are effective in ensuring victory (Donno and Roussias, 2012,
Simpser, 2008), despite the risks associated with democratizing uprisings following too
conspicuous attempts to temper with results (bearing in mind the large protests organized by
the opposition in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and more
recently Russia). In the countries included in this paper, all the elections that were judged
unacceptable by the U.S. State Department were unsurprisingly won by incumbents, as well
as the majority of elections deemed ambiguous (Table 2). Notwithstanding a few exceptions,
where power-holders were ousted in post-electoral protests, having recourse to electoral
manipulation, or electoral fraud is a strategy that clearly paid off for incumbents seeking to
hold on to power between 1989 and 2004 in post-communist countries.
[TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE]
The bulk of episodes of massive electoral fraud are found in the Caucasus, Central
Asia and Serbia pre-1998, which are the states also displaying the weakest levels of
infrastructural state capacity during the period under study (Fortin, 2010). Why is it, then, that
the majority of the most conspicuous electoral manipulation episodes recorded was in the
states with the weakest state infrastructure? Is political manipulation different from technical
incapacity?

3. WHAT FACILITATES ELECTORAL FRAUD?

The literature addressing the causes of electoral fraud branches in two directions. A
first approach concentrates on the incentives candidates face to engage in corruption, treating
electoral fraud as the result of the decision of individual candidates rather than a top down
mechanism controlled by an incumbent or a ruling party. Mainly directed at established
democracies, this literature usually takes the quality of electoral institutions for granted. A
second branch of the literature addresses the phenomenon of electoral fraud from a top down
perspective, focusing on power holders incentives to engage in massive fraud to retain power
in competitive authoritarian regimes. While both branches deal with the incentives that make
agents more likely to bend or break the rules of the game to boost their votes, few studies
have focused on the conditions that make electoral manipulation possible. A few studies have
stressed the high potential costs of certain fraudulent activities such as vote-buying (Lehoucq,
2003, Lehoucq and Molina, 2003, Molina and Lehoucq, 1999, Schaffer, 2007, Schaffer and
Schedler, 2007, Wang and Kurzman, 2007) and the need for high cohesion within the state
apparatus and control over the states coercive means to manipulate an election (Way, 2003,
2005, Way and Levitsky, 2006), but have not proposed empirical verifications of these
hypotheses. The boundaries between intentional manipulation and technical (in)capacity
remain largely uncharted (Pastor, 1999).
The largest part of contributions focus on the institutional features which have built-in
incentives for candidates to engage in corruption in (established) democracies: some
structural elements such as electoral rules seem to facilitate, or constrain, certain types of
behaviour on the part of candidates and parties, that are associated with cultivating a personal
vote such as violence intimidation and vote-buying. Properties of electoral laws like district
size and electoral formula influence candidates choice of strategy to engage in illegal
behaviour or not: whether citizens vote for parties or candidates, and the level of intra party
competition being the defining features shaping these strategies (Carey and Shugart, 1995,
Hicken, 2007, Katz, 1986, Nyblade and Reed, 2008). However the findings are not
unanimous on the role of PRand especially on the type of listsin shaping incentives to
break the rules. A branch of research finds that closed-list PR systems are more prone to
corruption (Kunicova and Rose Ackerman, 2005, Persson and Tabellini, 2003), while other
contributors find that closed-list PR systems are less vulnerable to corruption than
majoritarian systems because they reduce the incentives to cultivate a personal vote (Birch,
2007b, Carey and Shugart, 1995, Chang, 2005, Chang and Golden, 2006).

In emerging democracies the literature explaining electoral malpractice focuses on

other elements, such as the closeness of races, or inter-party competition, which in addition to
the factors mentioned above seem to shape the incentives for power holders to engage in
electoral fraud. In some of the scholarship on corrupt elections, electoral misconduct is seen
as a tool used to secure victory in close races (Argesinger, 1985, Cox and Kousser, 1981,
Lehoucq, 2003, Lehoucq and Molina, 2003, Mares and Zhu, 2011). While the idea that
electoral fraud is only used to secure numerical victory is intuitive, it has been challenged in
recent contributions. Authoritarian leaders also employ manipulation to increase their margins
of victory in asymmetrical races to discourage opposition parties from forming and running,
as well as voters to support them (Donno and Roussias, 2012, Simpser, 2008). For example as
outlined by Simsper (2008), in the 2000 presidential election in Georgia, rather than to be
content with an estimated 33 point advance over his adversary, Shevardnadze manipulated the
election to finally achieve 80% of all votes. Such large scale manipulation of results to
achieve landslide victories is not uncommon in former Soviet republics.
Despite the structure of incentives, do authorities in every country have the same tools
at their disposal to manipulate elections? While the contributions cited earlier in this section
illuminate the incentives which candidates face to engage in electoral manipulation, few
studies examine the infrastructures that make it possible for incumbents to have access to the
full menu of manipulation, and the existing contributions remain quite general about what
kind of infrastructure is necessary. A common assumption is that some top down control of
key state agencies and the control over sufficient means (coercive force, state finances) are
necessary for effective use of elections as instruments to confer legitimacy to authoritarian
rule. In other words, a certain level of state capacity is required to manipulate elections, but
what kind of capacity? Infrastructural, coercive, or both?

3.1 Types of state capacity: infrastructural vs. coercive

Michael Mann (1993), proposes a typology of state power as based on two
components. One is the infrastructural and administrative aspect, and the other is the despotic
power of the state. The former highlights the states capacity to achieve specific goals and
implement its policies. At the core of the infrastructural aspect of state power is the question
of the states authority over territory (Migdal et al., 1994). This understanding of state
capacity can be operationalized by examining the quality of public goods distribution in a
country, given the crucial role of public goods in establishing any states authority on
territories (Spruyt, 1994). By contrast, despotic power derives from the range of actions that
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state elites can undertake without routine negotiation with civil society groups (Mann, 1993,
p.59). The states ability to exert coercion hinges on this second type of power, where rulers
do not need the consent of people to rule. Hence states can be strong in two different ways
(Mann, 2008)
This paper proposes two mechanisms by which state capacity influences the quality of
elections: through infrastructural state capacity and coercive state capacity. On the one hand,
high infrastructural state capacity should serve as a constraining mechanism against most
categories of electoral fraud. If stronger rule of law curbs corruption by virtue of raising the
likelihood and costs of being caught (Ades and Di Tella, 1997, Damania et al., 2004), a
similar argument can be extended to the phenomenon of electoral fraud since both concepts
overlap. Electoral fraud is a form of corruption of the democratic process because it serves to
reduce the fairness of elections (Warren, 2004, Warren, 2006). The risk of reprisal shapes the
types of electoral fraud candidates decide to engage in: the existence of bodies supervising the
elections, the independence of these bodies, the likelihood of being detected and size of the
penalties.
When a states infrastructure is weak, power holders are freer to use the resources of
the state to buy electoral support. In the group of countries considered in this paper, those who
inherited weak state infrastructures after the collapse communism faced the most obstacles in
establishing functioning institutions of oversight: functioning agencies overseeing
privatization, courts staffed with competent personnel, law enforcement, and - most important
for the case at hand - electoral managements bodies (EMBs) (Fortin, 2012). High levels of
infrastructural state capacity should have positive impacts on the quality of EMBs.
Independent, impartial, and transparent regulatory and administrative electoral agencies are
crucial in providing credible institutional structures in which elections can take place (Birch,
2007a, Goodwin-Gill, 1994, Lpez-Pintor, 2000, Pastor, 1999). EMBs also influence the
quality of campaign resource regulations and the potential for electoral bodies to monitor
candidates and enforce compliance with rules.
A growing literature links the establishment of independent, or multi-party nominated
electoral commissions with improved election quality in Africa, Latin America and former
communist countries (Birch, 2007a, Hartlyn, 1994, Mozaffar, 2002). Such effective EMBs
supervise and monitor the electoral process to diminish the risk of misuse of resources, ensure
fair media coverage, but also supervise the produce of up to date and accurate voter lists
which can be expensive. For example, in the early 2000s, the U.S. Agency for International
Development spent US$1.5 million to computerize Georgias voter list, which was rejected at
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the last minute by the Georgian Central Electoral Commission claiming it contained mistakes.
The Central Electoral Commissionloyal to Shevardnadze then imposed a list that
excluded hundreds of thousands and contained convenient additions (Fairbanks, 2004). In
short, such institutions would serve to thwart decentralized activities performed by several
private and public agents like electoral lists manipulation and falsifying ballots on electionday, for example. Higher infrastructural state capacity should therefore be linked with low
incidences of electoral fraud.
On the flip side, we can also hypothesize that coercive state capacity is required for
some aspects of electoral malpractice. A common line of argumentation posits that some of
the types of electoral fraud such as vote-buying and the use of violence and intimidation on a
large scale require substantial logistic and material costs (Lehoucq, 2003, Lehoucq and
Molina, 2003, Molina and Lehoucq, 1999, Schaffer, 2007, Schaffer and Schedler, 2007,
Wang and Kurzman, 2007). The establishment and maintenance of nondemocratic rule
requires an important level of elite organization and state capacity. Way, and later Levistky
and Way (2003, 2005, 2006) maintain that the creation of an authoritarian regime requires a
high degree of elite cohesion and some top-down control on the part of the government in
order to manipulate the electoral process:
Central control and elite cohesion are also required to eliminate
uncertainty during elections In the current international environment,
manipulating elections involves being able to use the cover of laws and
regulations to fragment, intimidate, and marginalize the opposition before it
grows strong enough to mount a challenge on election day. (Way, 2003,
p.134).
Way and Levistky argue that the administration of coercion necessary to keep authoritarian
regimes going requires a certain form of cohesion within the state apparatus; among leaders,
police, military, and bureaucrats so that decisionseven coercive ones related to vote fraud
can be enacted. Instances of voter intimidation and or obstruction, and candidate intimidation
and obstruction pertain directly to a states coercive branch. In general, it is the states
coercive arms, the police, security service, and military, which intervene to intimidate voters,
or obstruct campaigns efforts. Even the most uncompetitive electoral contest put on display
the coercive power of the state; at one extreme are single-candidate plebiscites, which clearly
demonstrate the regimes coercive power: that it can compel people to participate in a ritual
that everyone knows is fake (Gandhi and Lust-Okar, 2009, p.406). In authoritarian
regimes, given that incumbents have control over state resources and means of coercion they
have a freer hand to use these tools.
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While most contributors agree that a certain amount of state capacity is needed to
engage in effective electoral malpractice, and that some infrastructural capacity is needed to
run elections, there exists to date no empirical verification about what type of state capacity is
needed, nor of the magnitude necessary. The remainder of the paper will focus on covering
this gap by proposing comparative empirical verification. I propose testing the following
hypotheses; weak infrastructural state capacity should be conducive to high levels of electoral
fraud, while high coercive power should also be linked to large levels of electoral
manipulation.

4. DATA AND METHODOLOGY

The hypotheses proposed above will be tested using a group of 26 postcommunist
countries from the first post-communist elections onwards.1 The countries considered are:
Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia,
Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, the Former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia (FYROM), Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovak Republic,
Slovenia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Although interesting cases, I
was not always able to include Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro in the present
study, due to very a very large amount of missing values on crucial variables. Taken together,
these 26 countries represent an ideal testing ground by offering a relatively controlled
environment concerning the development of their states and their constitutions (timing). Yet
we also observe large variations on both independent and dependent variables under study
which should enable us to verify the hypotheses using a full range of possible options.
The empirical verification will proceed in three steps. In a first step, I present bivariate
graphical evidence to illustrate the effects of infrastructural and coercive state capacity on the
general incidence of election fraud in the selected countries. In a second step, I use a series of
multivariate models to estimate the impact that infrastructural and coercive state capacity
might have on the general concept of electoral fraud. Third, to verify the robustness of these
findings, I disaggregate the general concept of electoral fraud in a set of more precise
categories to probe whether the effects of different types of state capacity operate in the same
way across a broad range of categories of electoral fraud.

4.1 Measuring the dependent variables: varieties of electoral malpractice

1

The unit of analysis considered, however is elections, not countries. This study takes into consideration both
legislative (lower house) and presidential elections (when presidents are directly elected).

Despite the extra-legal and covert aspect of the phenomenon, there is an increasing
amount of scholarship on electoral malpractice which employs comparative empirical
verifications. Given the rising interest in such data, a number of projects offering detailed
information on electoral processes around the world are now available to researchers. For
instance, the Electoral Malpractice and Electoral Manipulation in New and Semi-Democracies
dataset (Birch, 2009), the Quality of Elections Data (QED) (Kelley, 2010, 2012, Kelley and
Kolev, 2010), the National Elections across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) (Hyde and
Marionov, 2011) provide a rich empirical catalogue detailing both the types of practices and
the occurrence of electoral fraud around the world which this paper will take advantage of.2
When we open the conceptual box of electoral fraud, we find a wide ranging type of
ways candidates and parties can rig the electoral process during the campaign, on electionday, and after elections. Although there are a few competing conceptualization of the
phenomenon of electoral fraud (Birch, 2008, Calingaert, 2006, Elklit and Reynolds, 2005,
Schedler, 2002), this paper uses adapts the three categories proposed by Ziblatt (2009), more
or less faithfully. In the following analyses, I will make use of both general measurements of
electoral fraud (as provided by and a series of indicators for the different categories of the
larger concept.
A first category of electoral fraud pertains directly to coercion, where threats or
different methods are used to compel voters to vote for certain parties or candidates, but also
where power holders use intimidation tactics against the opposition to prevent them from
running. These will be measured by the following indicators: if there is evidence of voter
intimidation and obstruction (EMD), if there is evidence that the government harassed the
opposition (EMD), and weather opposition leaders prevented from running (EMD). A second
category is vote-buying, whether this is used for depressing votes or turnout. This will be
captured by an indicator evaluating the occurrence of vote-buying from EMD. The third
category regroups a few types of systematic procedural violations, that is, vote rigging,
polling station opening hours and location, registration roll tempering, but also the fairness of
the election coverage in the press. This last category of procedural violations being more
heterogeneous, I retained the following variables to tap into ins general meaning; the
improper use of campaign funds (QED), records of election day explicit cheating which is an
indicator that captures fraud related to the casting and tabulation of votes (QED), and last, I
include an indicator measuring the fairness of the media coverage during the campaign
(EMD).
2

Other data projects such as

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While this selection of indicators promises broad empirical coverage of different

varieties of electoral fraud, the items level of measurement limits the type of inference this
paper will be able to draw. As documented in other studies, electoral malpractice is likely a
continuous variable displaying more or less intensity, but available measurement does not
capture degrees (Donno and Roussias, 2012). In most cases the indicators are either ordinal,
or dichotomous, which confines the empirical verifications presented in this paper to
likelihood statements, and makes the evaluation of the substantive size of the effects of the
independent variables difficult to estimate.

4.2 Infrastructural State capacity

In this paper, the concept of state capacity will be measured via proxy of the quality of
the provision of public goods given their crucial role in establishing state authority on
territories (Spruyt, 1994). The approach to measurement hinges on a minimal definition of the
concept of state capacity in terms of infrastructural power, where infrastructural power is
defined as the institutional capacity of a central state, despotic or not, to penetrate its
territories and logistically implement decisions (Mann, 1993). This understanding of state
capacity is operationalized by examining the quality of provision of a class of collective
goods even a minimally-redistributive state should theoretically provide, as proposed by
recent work (Fortin, 2010). Rather than focusing on the measurement of absolute resources,
the measurement assumes that it is insufficient that a state should possess important human
and natural resources for the production of wealth: it must also be able to effectively make use
of those resources. This intentionally leaves aside the redistributive, despotic or coercive
power of states, since such aspects of power do not necessarily go hand in hand with
infrastructural power, although they sometimes do.
Some of the difficulty associated with this approach lies in finding not only
measurable and comparable instances of public-goods delivery, but also relevant data
documenting their existence and performance in the early years of transition, which is not
always simple. The index is based on the aggregation of five indicators: the ratio of tax
revenue to GDP in order to illustrate state taxing capacity, progress in infrastructure reform
(EBRD), levels of corruption (Heritage Foundation), the quality of property rights protection
(Heritage Foundation), and the ratio of contract intensive money (CIM), which are public
goods even a minimally redistributive state should be able to provide. To make the final
index, all indicators were standardized, and aggregated as a single measure. Factor and

11

correlation analyses reveal that the association among the items is strong and that they
measure a similar latent construct.3

4.3 Coercive State Capacity

The concept of coercive state capacity will be measured by two quantitative indicators
taping into the phenomenon of tangible use of repression on civilians, and the latent potential
for a state to employ repression. According to Wintrobe (1998) one of the repressive tools
employed by dictators is to ban groups, association, and political parties opposed to the
government. The dictator must ensure that the population is monitored and sanctioned for
these measures to be effective: The existence of a political police force and of extremely
severe sanctions for expressive and especially for organizing opposition to the government
(such as imprisonment, internment in mental hospitals, torture, and execution) is the hallmark
of dictatorships of all stripes (Wintrobe, 1998, p.34). To tap into this concept of overt
repression, I will use the Physical Integrity Rights Index from the CIRI Human Rights Data
Project (Cingranelli and Richards, 2010). This measure is an additive index composed of
instances of politically motivated disappearances, extrajudicial killings by government
officials without due process of law, the politically motivated incarceration of people by
government officials, and the use of torture on political opponents, which are at the core of
the concept of coercive state capacity.
One drawback of this measurement is that it only captures the instances where states
actually make use of these tactics; it does not capture those in which the state actually
possesses the capability to do so, but where leaders chose not to for various reasons. Given
this negative aspect, I buttress the measurement of the concept of coercive power by using a
second indicator, a measure of size of military per 100 inhabitants, which is drawn from the
Correlates of War Project (Singer et al., 1972, Singer and Small, 1995).4 This

Despite being high in validity and reliability, the index of state capacity I employ as an independent variable in
the following models suffers from an important weakness: missing data in the early years of transition. only 5%
of cases are missing To mitigate the problem of missing data, I chose to impute a portion of the cases (for tax
revenue and contract intensive money) using Amelia II (2001), the best option available to generate plausible and
unbiased results (Allison, 2000). In the case of corruption levels, and the quality of private property protection, I
chose a more conservative data interpolation technique where starting values are similar to the first year of actual
data coverage by Heritage Foundation (in most cases around 1995). The final index of state capacity therefore
contains both actual measurements and estimated measurements of individual indicators and should therefore be
handled and interpreted with a measure of prudence in the very early years
4
As Albertus and Menaldo (2012) noted, the variable is right-hand skewed and they chose to correct the
distribution through a natural logarithm power transformation. However in the present case, analyses show that a
logarithm transformation is less efficient than leaving the variable in its initial shape. Only square and cubic

12

operationalization of the concept is one of the most common in studies focusing on the onset
of civil wars (Hendrix, 2010). The use of this second indicator employed is justified on the
assumptions that at least among autocracies, the military is a good proxy for internal
repression (Albertus and Menaldo, 2012, p.153). The size of conventional military forces is
admittedly a crude measurement, since it does not capture other types of repressive and
specialized agencies used to control political opposition such as paramilitary units, security
forces, and secret police, which are considered paramount to size a states capacity not only to
maintain order, but also to repress opponents (Gurr, 1988). However I believe that using these
two indicators in combination allows me to cover a large part of the conceptual space of the
concept of coercive state capacity.5

4.4 Control variables, alternative hypotheses

Several additional control variables were considered for inclusion in the empirical
models in order to rule out the effect of omitted, or rival, hypotheses on the dependent
variables. I considered a range of variables we might expect to impact the likelihood of
electoral fraud which are detailed below.

4.4.1. Socioeconomic factors. Socioeconomic factors are considered to affect the likelihood
of electoral fraud: behaviours like vote-buying were found to be more common in contexts
where poverty is prevalent (Anand, 2001, Brusco et al., 2002), even though the empirical
evidence is unclear. Hence the following analyses will include a control for the level of
development of each country measured by GDP per capita (World Bank, 2000 LCU). Another
socioeconomic control included is the level of urbanization, which also affects the candidate
strategies (Nielson and Shugart, 1999, Ramseyer and Rosenbluth, 1993), as well as the level
of inequality measured via GINI coefficients, to control for the effects of asymmetric
socioeconomic power on the incidence of electoral fraud (Ziblatt, 2009).

4.4.2. Institutions. A set of control variables is included to capture the effect of institutions on
the incentives to engage in electoral fraud. I include a dummy variable for the use of plurality
rules versus other types. Since legislative and presidential elections in countries with different
regime types have different importance for the exercise of power (for instance parliamentary
transformations could potentially slightly correct for the skewness. Since the correction would only be marginal,
to ease interpretation, I will use the variable in its natural distribution.
5
Readers should not that CIRIs Physical Integrity Rights Index is only weakly associated with the size of
military forces per 100 inhabitants. Pearsons r=-0.14 with 209 valid cases.

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elections in presidential regimes are less consequential than in a parliamentary regimes since
the executive is often not responsible to the assembly), I have computed a dummy variable to
capture if the prime position of power is at stake in the election. For presidential regimes,
presidential elections are coded 1, and for parliamentary regimes, legislative elections are
coded 1. This measures if power is really at stake in the election. I expect more fraudulent
activities when the stakes are highest.

4.4.3. Competition. Although we know that the form of competition, the closeness of races,
affects the incentives to engage in electoral fraud, I did not include a control many other
studies include for the following reason: official election results are the combined outcome
of two unknown and unobservable variables-popular preferences and authoritarian
manipulation (Schedler, 2006). A measure of the victors margin of victory would be an
endogenous predictor. In order to at least try to control for the competitiveness of the contest I
selected NELDAs indicator of whether incumbents were confident of their victory prior to
the elections.6

4.4.4. Other controls. I include a control for the proportion of fuel exports to control for other
means regimes might have at their disposal to alter the electoral process since previous regime
has show that if the regime controls natural resources or other economic means, it should be
able to increase its spending (Morrison, 2009). Oil exports (measured as the percentage of oil
exports to total exports) will serve as a control variable for the incentives facing rulers to
engage in resources exploitation to extract rents and set up institutions that will facilitate this
purpose. The use of this variable is also drawn by Ross who argues that leaders in resource
rich countries make use of the rents to finance repression to stay in power (Ross, 2001). A
rough trend variable, the number of years elapsed since independence from communism, will
also serve to capture effects of maturation and regime development that could account for
some extent of variance in the dependent variables.

5. ANALYSES
What is the role of different types of state capacity on the quality of elections? Are
weaknesses in the key dimensions of state power leading to more or less electoral malpractice
in post-communist countries? Weaknesses in infrastructural state capacity indeed seem to be
6

Unfortunately this indicator contains few overlapping observations with other variables and could not be
included in all models since it significantly reduced the already limited amount of cases.

14

related with higher levels of electoral fraud observed in elections. Figure 2 presents a bivariate
scatter plot between the level of infrastructural state capacity a variable combining the overall
quality of the elections (QED): the relationship between the two variables is non-trivial
(R2=0.53). The majority of cases of heavy tempering with electoral proceedings are located in
the upper right corner of the graph, in the states with lower levels of infrastructural state
capacity.
However, the relationship is not fully linear and presents some outliers, for instance
the Polish Sejm elections of 1989 and the 1997 presidential elections in Croatia where
massive electoral problems occurred in states with well functioning infrastructures. Although
they led to the installation of a non-communist prime minister and eventually of the demise of
the communist regime, Polands 1989 parliamentary elections were not competitive since
some blocks of seats were reserved in advance for certain preapproved groups and political
parties (Lewis, 1990). In Croatia, war-time leader Franjo Tuman won both successive
presidential elections by large margins (56,7% in 1992 and 60,3% in 1997); Tuman and his
party the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) ruled Croatia with a tight authoritarian grip until
his death in 1999. At the other extreme, we also notice that a weak state infrastructure should
not be automatically equated with electoral fraud. We find a large amount of cases in the
bottom left quadrant of Figure 2, which means that a strong state infrastructure is indeed no
sufficient condition to the holding of problem-free elections: Armenias very first presidential
elections held in 1991, for instance, are the only ones in the countrys history that were
largely perceived as free and fair by the international community (Fuller, 2008).
[FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE]
[FIGURE 3 ABOUT HERE]
The link between coercive capacity and election quality reveals an inverse
relationship, as hypothesized in the previous section. Figure 3 presents a bivariate scatter plot
between of the proxy depicting the level of coercive state capacity and variable combining the
overall quality of the elections and the extents of problems identified (QED). Here as well, the
relationship between the two variables is sizeable (R2=0.34), and presents a large amount of
outliers including the Croatian presidential elections held in 1997. Although the climate of
coercion was among the lowest of the group of countries, the electoral process presented a
significant amount of problems. While most problem-free elections are located in the low
coercion environments, there is large variability in the level of physical integrity found in the
countries where elections were most problematic. This suggests either that the proxy selected
for the concept of coercive power does not cover the conceptual space of the concept, or that
15

crucial variables that have an impact on this relationship have been omitted. Further
verification of these findings will be established in the following section using multivariate
models.

5.1 Multivariate models

In the following analyses, I estimate a number of empirical models using varying
specifications to test the robustness of the state capacity hypotheses. I first present a series of
models testing the hypotheses on general measurements of electoral fraud, and then present
models verifying the hypotheses on subtypes of electoral malpractice: coercion, vote-buying
and procedural irregularities.
Table 3 reports the findings for a pooled analysis that covers the period between 1989
and 2004, for 26 post-communist countries. The following analyses draw on ordered logit
models for ordinal dependent variables with clustered robust standard errors, given that
QEDs extent of problems variable contains 4 ordinal categories.7 In Model 1 of Table 3, I
present a baseline model only including infrastructural state capacity and the two variables
measuring coercive state capacity. Model 1 substantiates the patterns displayed in Figures 2
and 3 concerning the effects of infrastructural versus coercive state capacity on the likelihood
of electoral fraud. The parameter estimate presented in odds ratios in Table 3 for
infrastructural state capacity is negatively linked with high levels in electoral manipulation.
The direction of the relationship is as expected between both indicators of coercive state
capacity and the dependent variable, although coercive state capacity measured in terms of
military personnel does not achieve statistical significance. Of importance, the effects
uncovered seem considerable in the case of infrastructural state capacity. For a one unit
increase in levels of infrastructural state capacity, the odds of high levels of problems versus
the combined lower categories decreases by about 90 percent, holding the other variables
constant.
[TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE]
The addition of several control variables in Model 2 does not significantly alter the
form of these relationships; here however, the coefficient for coercive state capacity measured
in terms of military personnel reaches an acceptable level of statistical significance. All three
7

The small sample and spread out categories make the estimates fragile. A series of Brant tests (Long and
Freese, 2006) indicated that the parallel lines assumptions underlying ordered logistic regressions were violated.
For verification, the following analyses were also performed using generalized ordered logit models for ordinal
dependent variables (Williams, 2006). The results are sensibly the same. Additional testing reveals that the cut
points separating the values of the dependent variables are statistically significantly different from each other in
the three models contained in Table 3.

16

indicators of state capacity present parameter estimates in the expected direction. For every
unit increase in infrastructural state capacity, the odds of high levels of electoral fraud versus
the combined lower categories are 0.068 times lower: the effect of this variable is
considerable. As well, every unit decrease in CIRIs physical integrity rights index increases
the probability of high levels of problems in elections,8 while increases in military personnel
per capital is linked to high levels of problems in elections. As expected, coercive state
capacity and infrastructural state capacity function in opposing logics in the group of
countries under study.
Socioeconomic controls also mostly perform in the expected direction. Although
strongly linked with infrastructural state capacity, GDP per capita and the percent of urban
population present similar relationships as found in existing literature. Increases in levels of
development and urbanization are linked to lower likelihood of electoral malpractice. Yet, the
sign of the coefficient for the level if inequality in each case is puzzling; it seems, all else
being held constant, that inequality is negatively linked with the likelihood of important
election fraud. This counterintuitive finding is difficult to account for substantively. Given the
recent communist past of our cases, it could be that levels of inequality were more similar in
many countries during early transition years than were Lnder in Imperial Germany over a
century ago, where this theory was originally tested (Ziblatt, 2009).
The two institutional control variables considered exert some explanatory power on
the dependent variable, which mirrors existing findings. The dummy variable measuring
usage of plurality electoral rules is a dominant influence. Majoritarian electoral contests
increase of the odds of electoral malpractice by a factor of 4. While the effect of this control
dwarfs other variables, it is unclear if its magnitude is driven by the composition of this
sample containing an abnormally large amount of presidential regimes, and thus presidential
elections (presidential elections employing majoritarian electoral rules), or if some intrinsic
features of electoral rules indeed facilitate power abuse.9 The second variable, whether an
election is held for the position holding most power in a country, is positively linked to the
likelihood of electoral fraud. This result suggests that incumbents invest more resources to rig
races in which the potential of losing is more consequential.

The physical integrity rights index ranges from 0 (no government respect) to 8 (full government respect).
Because of the strong correlation between electoral rules and regime type, I was not able to include a regime
type control variable to these analyses. However, ne could hypothesize that the effects of regime types are
encapsulated in both electoral rules and election for the most powerful position. As well, a set of dummy
variables to control for election type (presidential, legislative, fused) either turnout out insignificant or was
dropped due to collinearity.
9

17

In line with a number of previous studies, the coefficient for fuel export in percent
GDP is significant in the hypothesized direction. Despite this confirmatory result, predicted
probabilities (not shown) indicate that the effect of oil, when translated into resources for
political leaders, likely only operates at very high values of the variable and with a large
degree of uncertainty. Considered over its average range, the effect of this variable is
therefore likely trivial. Although modelled crudely in the form of a linear effect measured in
the number of years since the fall of each countrys communist regime, the effects of time
displays a positive coefficient with the extent of problems observed in postcommunist
elections, which is contrary to some of what is posited in the literature. For instance, Lindberg
finds that repeated electoral activities create incentives for political actors fostering the
expansion and deepening of democratic values. In addition to improving the democratic
qualities of political regimes, a sequence of elections tends to expand and solidify de facto
civil liberties in society (Lindberg, 2006). It seems that in the group of countries at hand, the
more elections are carried out, the higher the odds of electoral fraud. Although the effect of
this variable is not large, there could be a reverse process of authoritarian learning at work in
certain countries, where incumbents become more capable to make use of the repertoire of
electoral manipulations.
The addition of a control variable measuring the competitiveness of elections in Model
3 gives us some clues about the importance of interparty competition on the likelihood of
electoral fraud. In our cases, where incumbents or ruling parties were confident of their
victory before the elections, the odds of high levels of electoral fraud versus the combined
lower categories were 2.6 times higher (however, given the small number of cases in this
model, I would advise cautiousness in interpreting this coefficient).
To illustrate the substantive effects of different types of state capacity on the
probability of fraudulent elections, I simulated the effect of infrastructural and coercive state
capacity on the probability of observed fraudulent elections using Model 2 (holding all
control variables at their mean value). The results are presented in Table 4. Infrastructural
state capacity clearly has the largest marginal effects on the dependent variable. Moving from
the minimum to the maximum value of state capacity the probability of observing a problemfree election increases by 0.52, while the probability of observing a highly problematic
election decreases by a factor of 0.44. The changes in predicted probabilities for the two
indicators of coercive state capacity are smaller for these categories of the dependent variable,
but still substantively influential.
[TABLE 4 ABOUT HERE]
18

Given that the dependent variable employed in Models 1 to 3 is general and highly
aggregated, we can further refine the findings by decomposing the phenomenon of electoral
manipulation empirically to examine which aspects of sate capacity are at work in specific
types of fraudulent activities. Table 4 presents a series of seven logistic regression models
using different dependent variables depicting subtypes of electoral fraud; voter and candidate
intimidation, whether contestants were banned, the occurrence of vote-buying, blatant
election day cheating, problematic voter lists, and unfair media coverage.10 Although the
analyses are limited by the small number of valid observations in some of the dependent
variables, the disaggregated categories of electoral fraud reveal some interesting patterns that
allow the observation of some interesting variations.
[TABLE 5 ABOUT HERE]
All seven models presented in Table 4 display negative parameter estimates between
levels of infrastructural state capacity and the different forms of electoral fraud.11 When all
other variables are held constant, low levels of infrastructural state capacity increase the
likelihood of flawed elections of all types. The two indicators measuring the level of coercive
state capacity do not achieve the same unambiguous effects across our dependent variables.
CIRIs Physical Integrity Rights Index has no statistically significant impact on coercive
aspects of electoral malpractice; that is, on the likelihood of voter intimidation, candidate
intimidation, or the banning of candidates. This means that the use of torture, extrajudicial
killing, political imprisonment and disappearance does not increase the likelihood of voter
and opposition harassment when other factors are taken into account. The only significant
effect of this indicator in the theorized direction is in the model estimating the likelihood of
unfair media coverage. As well, the second proxy employed to tap into the concept of
coercive state capacity achieved limited impact except in two instances. In the models
estimating the likelihood of voter intimidation and instances of election-day cheating, the size
of the coefficient for the size of military personnel per capita is statistically significant in the
hypothesized direction.

10

All original dependent variables from EMD and QED were measured in ordinal scales. when ordered logistic
regressions were performed, the small amount of cases made it even impossible to perform Brant tests (Long and
Freese, 2006), and yielded insignificant thresholds (cut points used to differentiate the adjacent levels of the
response variable).
11
GDP per capita was dropped in some models due to high collinearity with infrastructural state capacity which
made both variables loose statistical significance when included together. In the models where GDP per capita
was omitted, readers must be aware that the variable only achieves significance once infrastructural state
capacity was pulled from the analyses. Both variables therefore share a large variance that makes it difficult to
estimate their independent effects in very small samples.

19

Vote-buying appears to be a different class of phenomenon. Not only is the measure of

fit (pseudo-R2) much lower for this model than for the others, but many predictors experience
a sign reversal. In the case of vote-buying, CIRIs Physical Integrity Rights Index is positively
associated with the likelihood of vote-buying, so is higher urbanization. This distinctive
picture becomes clearer when an additional control for the presence of a ceiling on political
parties expenditures is added to this model (International Institute for Democracy and
Electoral Assistance (IDEA), 2003).12 Not only does the parameter estimate for ceilings on
expenditures become dominant in the model, it reverses the signs of level of urbanization and
inequality in a direction that fits existing contributions. Even if there is a possibility that these
results are statistical artefacts of this small sample and the measurements employed, dynamics
of voter-buying seem to tap into a different logics, one where uncontrolled party expenditures
and patron-client networks are some of the crucial factors facilitating this phenomenon, and
where coercion does not play a leading role (Wang and Kurzman, 2007), although coercion
sometimes accompanies vote-buying (for example Mexico, see Shelley, 1999).

6. CONCLUSIONS
This paper has examined the effect of infrastructural and coercive state capacity on
electoral fraud in postcommunist countries. The main empirical finding is that electoral fraud
is more likely when infrastructural state capacity is weak. Infrastructural capacity probably
acts as a proxy to evaluate how imperfections in voting infrastructure shape the ability of
elites to interfere electorally. This hypothesis allows some insight with a view to separate
intentional political manipulation from individuals from technical incapacity, two set of
factors that can lead to low quality elections (Pastor, 1999). This paper also addresses the
literature on robustness of a states coercive apparatus and the prospects for democratization.
Although it could be the case that a states coercive apparatus functions as an intervening
variable sustaining autocracy as proposed by Albertus and Menaldo (2012), the infrastructural
capacity seems to trump the coercive side of the state at some point, at least in the case of
electoral fraud.
However the analyses also suggest that there is not a single answer to the question of
what causes electoral malpractice. Structures underlying electoral malpractice vary by the
type of electoral fraud under consideration: voter and candidate intimidation, fraudulent
12

IDEAs data coverage is limited and excludes 11 out of our 26 countries. These results should be interpreted
with a measure of prudence. As well, it should be noted that the presence of ceilings on political parties
expenditures does not achieve statistical significance in any other model presented in Table 4.

20

tabulation of votes, unfair media coverage of campaigns, and vote buying seem to engage
different sets of facilitating structures. The findings in this paper bring more nuances to some
the existing literature that deals with electoral fraud as a single type of general phenomenon.
The results show that different variables seem to explain different varieties of electoral fraud
better than others. The large differences across models open the path for new theorization, and
more careful empirical testing. While this paper does not address what motivates agents to
engage in cheating to increase vote shares, but only the structures, which should serve to hold
at bay, or facilitate the use of different types of electoral fraud, the present findings could
serve to revisit some of the theories underling incentive structures.
Empirically, we seem to be a long way from finding definitive answers. This papers
main empirical limitation is that none of the analyses allow looking into the magnitude of the
phenomenon of electoral fraud. For now, most data projects offer limited measurement of
whether a type of phenomenon occurs or not, or crude ordinal classification from which we
can only draw limited inferences. This is probably due to the difficulties in observation. If we
knew by how much votes were inflated, we could establish the magnitude of ballot fraud.
Some, however, doubt that we will be able to find reliable measurement for phenomena like
fraud and intimidation (Przeworski et al., 2000). It also seems that there is yet little empirical
basis for categorizing different varieties of electoral fraud, and at times, little agreement
between data sources which raises some issues about how much we know about electoral
fraud and the possibility generalization.

21

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25

TABLE 1 EXTENT OF PROBLEMS IN ELECTIONS 1989-2004 28 POST-COMMUNIST

COUNTRIES
EXTENT OF PROBLEMS

Count

Percent

44
40
54
33

25.73
23.39
31.58
19.30

No problems
Minor problems only
Moderate problems
Major problems

Total
171
100
Source: QED (Kelley, 2010) for 28 postcommunist countries from 1989 to 2004
TABLE 2 TYPES OF WINNER BY OVERALL ELECTION QUALITY
DID INCUMBENTS
Overall election quality
WIN THE
ELECTIONS?
Acceptable Ambiguous Unacceptable
No
44
2
0
Yes
65
7
48
Total
109
9
48
Source: QED (Kelley, 2010) for 28 postcommunist countries from 1989 to 2004

20

40

60

80

Poland 1989

% Ambiguous or Unacceptable Elections

100

FIGURE I: PERCENTAGE OF ELECTIONS JUDGED AMBIGUOUS OR

UNACCEPTABLE 1989-2004 (QED)

1989

1992

1995

1998

2001

2004

Year

Source: QED (Kelley, 2010) for 28 postcommunist countries from 1989 to 2004

26

Poland 1989

Croatia 1997

FIGURE 2: OVERALL ELECTION QUALITY AND EXTENT OF PROBLEMS IN

RELATION TO INFRASTRUCTURAL STATE CAPACITY (QED)13

Georgia 1995
Mongolia 1990

Gerogia 1992

Armenia 1991

Minimum

Maximum

Level of State Capacity

Level of Problems

Lowess

Croatia 1997
Croatia
1997

FIGURE 3: OVERALL ASSESSMENT OF THE ELECTION IN RELATION TO LEVEL

COERCIVE STATE CAPACITY (QED)14

Mongolia
1990
Mongolia 1990
Georgia 1992
Georgia
1992

Russia 2004
Russia
2004

Russia 1995
Russia
1995

Romania 2000

Serbia
2003
Serbia 2003
High Coersion

Low coercion

Level Physical Integrity (Proxy for State Coercive Capacity)

Extent of Problems

Fitted values

13

The variable combining overall election quality and extent of problems is from QED dataset, and ranges from
1 to 5. Graph 2 contains 148 valid observations. R2= 0.53. Vertical line is positioned at the average of
infrastructural state capacity.
14
The variable combining overall election quality and extent of problems is from QED dataset, and ranges from
1 to 5. Graph 3 contains 153 valid observations. R2= 0.34. . Vertical line is positioned at the average of SIRIs
Physical integrity Index (-5.19)

27

TABLE 3. ORDERED LOGISTIC REGRESSION MODELING THE EXTENT OF

PROBLEMS RECORDED IN ELECTIONS (QED)
Model 1
Model 2
Model 3
OR/se
OR/se
b/se
Extent of problems in Election
Infrastructural State Capacity

0.068***
(0.03)

0.172***
(0.11)

0.171**
(0.13)

Coercive State Capacity I

(Physical Integrity)

0.645***
(0.08)

0.768*
(0.11)

0.691**
(0.11)

Coercive State Capacity II

(Military per 100 pers.)

1.553
(0.63)

3.258*
(2.03)

2.130
(1.54)

GDP per capita WB

0.999*
(0.00)

0.999**
(0.00)

Percent urban population

0.926***
(0.02)

0.932**
(0.03)

Inequality (GINI index)

0.910**
(0.03)

0.879***
(0.04)

Election for most powerful position

1=yes

2.205*
(0.91)

2.962**
(1.57)

Plurality electoral rules

1=yes

4.111**
(2.84)

2.552
(2.01)

Fuel exports (% GDP)

1.060***
(0.02)

1.073***
(0.03)

Time since first year of

independence or transition

1.164***
(0.64)

1.176***
(0.07)
2.634*
(1.39)

Was the ruling party confident of

victory before elections?
Observations
McFaddens R2
*

149
0.342

134
0.432

106
0.479

p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01

28

TABLE 4. THE IMPACT OF INFRASTRUCTURAL AND COERCIVE STATE CAPACITY ON ELECTORAL FRAUD
Change in Predicted Probabilitiesa
Ordered Logit
Moderate
Type of state capacity
No problems
Minor problems
High problems
Estimatesb
problems
Infrastructural State Capacity

-1.77***
(0.67)

0.52

0.34

-0.43

-0.44

Coercive State Capacity I

(Physical Integrity)

-0.27**
(0.14)

0.12

0.33

-0.31

-0.14

Coercive State Capacity II

(Military per 100 pers.)

1.19*
(0.61)

-0.11

-0.31

0.31

0.12

(N=134)
2 (df=10) = 63.40
McFaddens R2 = 0.43
Source: Extent of Problems QED (Kelley, 2010) for 26 postcommunist countries from 1989 to 2004
a
Change in the predicted probabilities of reaching each level for an increase from the minimum to the maximum value of each independent variable,
while holding all other independent variables constant at their means.
b
The top entries are ordered logit coefficients. Standard errors are in parentheses.
**p<.001; *p<.01 (two-tailed tests)

29

TABLE 5. LOGISTIC REGRESSIONS MODELING DIFFERENT VARIETIES OF ELECTORAL FRAUD

Voter
Candidate
Contestants Vote-buying Election day
intimidation intimidation
banned
cheating

Infrastructural State Capacity

OR/se
0.045***
(0.04)

OR/se
0.063***
(0.06)

OR/se
0.052***
(0.05)

OR/se
0.396
(0.44)

OR/se
0.020***
(0.02)

Low administrative
capacity
OR/se
0.058***
(0.05)

Coercive State Capacity I

(Physical Integrity)

1.137
(0.21)

1.265
(0.26)

0.909
(0.28)

2.435***
(0.77)

0.983
(0.16)

1.081
(0.22)

0.494**
(0.15)

Coercive State Capacity II

(Military per 100 pers.)

7.587*
(8.77)

2.750
(2.99)

0.272
(0.31)

1.524
(1.62)

14.540***
(11.96)

2.225
(2.32)

0.560
(0.59)

0.999*
(0.00)

1.000
(0.00)

GDP per capita

Unfair
media
coverage
OR/se
0.015*
(0.04)

1.000
(0.00)

Percent urban population

1.032
(0.03)

1.049
(0.03)

1.027
(0.04)

1.067*
(0.04)

1.006
(0.03)

0.991
(0.03)

0.912
(0.06)

Inequality (GINI index)

0.975
(0.06)

0.994
(0.07)

0.801***
(0.06)

1.090
(0.09)

1.024
(0.05)

1.011
(0.06)

0.930
(0.07)

Election for most powerful position

1=yes

0.283
(0.23)

0.807
(0.61)

1.209
(0.97)

0.633
(0.43)

1.486
(0.78)

0.486
(0.30)

2.805
(2.39)

Plurality electoral rules

1=yes

0.384
(0.40)

2.473
(2.47)

1.991
(2.20)

0.936
(0.95)

4.155*
(3.54)

0.568
(0.62)

1.420
(1.63)

Fuel exports (% GDP)

1.022
(0.03)

1.018
(0.02)

1.043
(0.03)

1.006
(0.02)

0.970*
(0.02)

1.011
(0.01)

1.061
(0.04)

Time since first year of

independence or transition

1.195*
(0.12)

1.155
(0.12)

0.895
(0.10)

1.103
(0.13)

1.430***
(0.13)

1.614***
(0.20)

0.874
(0.09)

Observations
McFaddens R2

73
0.307

71
0.312

74
0.422

70
0.189

133
0.449

134
0.363

76
0.531

Exponentiated coefficients
*
p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01

30