Cleaning Up Corrupt Elections: Lessons from History?

“Polling: The Humors of an Election,” William Hogarth, 1755

"The Polling" from The Humours of an Election Series, William Hogarth (1755)

This is a multi-country project which explores whether there are lessons to be learned from how election fraud subsided or was reduced in past historical instances of democratization. For emerging democracies today, the nineteenth and twentieth century historical experiences offer possible insights into two interrelated questions that occupy us: What strategies, if any, were used to combat election fraud historically?  Can specific institutional reforms help make the practice of elections fairer and freer without diminishing political participation? The work for this project has included a range of smaller projects, including historical case studies (findings reported in a forthcoming co-edited volume), a survey experiment in Hungary in 2014, and a study of media and elections in contemporary Turkey.