As elections become more prevalent as the stated method of choosing who governs, is the world actually becoming less democratic? In their new book, How to Rig an Election, Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas argue that the increase in voting has not led to a corresponding rise in the embracing of democratic norms, with voter intimidation, strategic misinformation, and ballot-rigging common in many countries that describe themselves as democratic.

The greatest political paradox of our time is this: there are more elections than ever before, but the world is becoming less democratic.

Nowadays, elections are held almost everywhere. The vast majority of governments at least go through the motions of election campaigns, and are rhetorically committed to allowing citizens to cast ballots to choose the leaders who will govern them. However, in many places, that choice is little more than an illusion: the contest is rigged from the start.

In our new book, How to Rig an Election, we argue that elections have been co-opted by regimes across the globe to tighten their grip on power. Previously, it was assumed that a deluge of elections would lead to a flood of incumbents losing power. Instead, a small proportion of incumbents are losing office, and in some places, like sub-Saharan Africa, we actually find little difference in incumbent turnover rates since the ‘Third Wave of Democracy’ swept across the continent in the late 1980s. Some single-party dictatorships are actually less stable than ‘counterfeit democracies’ that are authoritarian but hold ostensibly multi-party elections. In other words, if you want to stay in power, rigging elections is preferable to not holding them at all. Continue reading →