Making and Breaking Elections

Catalog description

This seminar examines two aspects of modern political life: election administration and electoral malfeasance. Election administration describes the set of policies and practices that determine how an election is carried out. Electoral malfeasance describes the strategies political actors use to rig the electoral process or manipulate results. These topics are intertwined. Election administration can be used as a political tool to the benefit or detriment of a candidate, using election policies to create an uneven playing field. And while well-designed election administration can minimize the chances of fraud, mere perceptions of fraud can undermine the legitimacy of even high-quality electoral institutions, bringing the result of an election into doubt. This research seminar focuses on the methods and research designs used in quantitative social science to study (i) the effects election administration has on voter behavior and (ii) the presence of fraud in a set of election returns. Students will dissect recent work in the field, present on cutting edge work, and complete a replication-and-extension or pre-analysis plan that they may carry out as a capstone project.