Why Elections Fail

Norris argues that the most effective interventions for strengthening electoral integrity involve domestic constitutional, legal, and regulatory arrangements rather than structural conditions or international pressures . She rejects the conventional assumption that elections fail primarily because of poverty, ethnic heterogeneity, or weak state capacity, and she also rejects the view that international monitoring and diplomatic pressure alone can solve the problem. The essential institutional aspect is rules that prevent winners from consolidating power by manipulating electoral governance, combined with electoral authorities that have sufficient resources and capacities to manage contests effectively .

The book's framework is a three-way comparison of structural, international, and institutional accounts of electoral failure, tested through the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI) dataset—an expert survey measuring compliance with international standards across 11 stages of the electoral cycle . The PEI index, developed by Norris's Electoral Integrity Project, is now widely used by international policy makers and academics to rank election quality across countries . The 2024 Global Electoral Integrity Report continues this work, adding new contests and refining the methodology to measure whether elections empower citizens and deliver democracy .

Norris identifies two parallel streams in existing research: one focused on intentional repression in hybrid regimes like Russia, and another focused on maladministration in established democracies like the United States . She argues both are too narrow. Her book adopts a global comparative framework starting from the agnostic position that electoral malpractices anywhere can arise from limitations of democratic governance, whether from restrictions on human rights or from administrative failures . This diverges from the conventional literature by refusing to limit comparison to any particular regime type or to treat repression and maladministration as separate phenomena .

The PEI index assesses electoral integrity across 11 categories: electoral laws, electoral procedures, district boundaries, voter registration, party and candidate registration, campaign media, campaign finance, voting process, vote count, post-election period, and electoral authorities . Each stage is scored from 0 to 100 based on expert assessments, producing an overall PEI index and comparative rankings . Campaign finance and campaign media consistently score lowest across countries, while election procedures and the vote count tend to score highest . This staged approach allows researchers to identify precisely where electoral integrity breaks down.

A significant critique is that Norris's emphasis on institutional design may underestimate the extent to which formal rules are themselves products of underlying power distributions. If incumbents can manipulate electoral governance, they may also be able to prevent the adoption of the very power-sharing rules Norris recommends. Critics also note that the PEI dataset, while valuable, relies on expert perceptions rather than direct observation, which may introduce bias. The book's finding that structural conditions like poverty matter less than institutions remains contested, particularly by scholars who emphasize the resource constraints facing electoral authorities in developing countries.

The book is the second volume in a planned trilogy on electoral integrity. The first volume, Why Electoral Integrity Matters (2014), examined the consequences of flawed elections—how malpractice erodes trust in democracy and political participation . This second volume turns to the causes of electoral failure. The trilogy is part of the Electoral Integrity Project, a six-year research project directed by Norris that involved scholars from Harvard and the University of Sydney . The third volume addresses what can be done to strengthen electoral governance, building on the diagnostic framework developed here .