European Union election observation missions: how to assess effectiveness?

Since the end of the Cold War, a universal consensus has appeared on the desirability of pluralist democracy and this implied a heavy emphasis on multi-party elections to promote democratization. In the wake of this renewed enthusiasm, during the early 1990s several developing countries experienced numerous competitive multiparty elections that marked for various of them a transition from a long period of authoritarian, military or one-party rule to weak democratic governments.2 While countries that undertook later in the 1990s the political transition continued to hold founding elections, in countries that had experienced early regime change, the ending of electoral cycles originated a wave of “second” elections that started the possibility of a democratic consolidation.3 By the middle of the 1990s one of the most striking developments related to this wave of founding and second elections has been the flourishing of an international election observation industry: first in Africa, countries which had suffered decades of civil war started a peace process with multi-party elections and many one-party or military regimes were replaced by governments deriving their mandate from multi-party elections. Donor governments, international organizations and NGOs sent thousands of international elections observers to these countries.4 Their goals were roughly the same: promoting peace, fostering democracy, supporting human rights. According to the European Commission, for example, “Election observation expresses the EU’s interest and concern in promoting democratic elections within its wider policy of support for democracy, the rule of law and human rights”.5 “The purpose of an EU Election Observation Missions around the world is to provide support for the development of the country’s democratic institutions and procedures, and to assist partner countries in their objective to hold elections of a high standard. In this context the EU EOM [Electoral Observation Mission] will conduct a comprehensive analysis of the electoral process”.6 Analogous are the purposes of other international (such as the United Nation, the African Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe/Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, etc.) and governmental and non-governmental organizations (Carter Center, International IDEA, IFES, International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute, etc.).7 Thus, the ultimate purpose of any observation mission is to support states in realizing their commitment to hold democratic elections with an eye to democratization. While scholars and policy makers admit how complex and multi-faceted the problem of democratization is (there are historical, cultural and institutional factors enabling democracy to prosper), in practice, policy measures were strongly focused on elections. Implicit in this emphasis on multi-party elections is the assumption that elections are pivotal for democracy and democratization. Surprisingly, however, very little attention has been paid to the effectiveness of electoral observation missions and few empirical work has been done8 to discover whether electoral observation missions is effective in deterring and discovering election-day fraud. Therefore, this will be the focus of my research proposal. The question I will try to answer in this paper is: How can we assess international election observation effectiveness in deterring election-day fraud? In the following pages I will first describe European Union election observation methodology, whit an eye also to the bureaucratic machine behind it. The reason why I decided to focus on EU’s work is twofold: first, the EU (as the OSCE/ODHIR) adopts a methodology that is particularly suitable for empirical quasi-experimental research, as we will see in the second part of this work; second, the EU, contrary to the OSCE/ODHIR focuses its work on Africa, the continent whose democratic processes I am interested in. In the second part, therefore, I will show the research design of the project I am presenting.