3 - Research Strategy

Summary

Chapter 3 lays out the book’s research strategy for testing its theory. Since talking to citizens directly is the best way to see how foreign actors influence perceptions of election credibility, Bush and Prather rely heavily on evidence from nationally representative surveys that were conducted for this project, although they also rely on other forms of qualitative and quantitative evidence. In total, they conducted ten large-scale surveys across elections in three countries at different levels of democracy. Specifically, Bush and Prather studied citizens’ perceptions of the 2014 parliamentary and presidential elections in Tunisia (a transitional democracy), the 2016, 2018, and 2020 general elections in the United States (a consolidated democracy), and the 2018 first-round and second-round presidential elections in Georgia (a partial democracy). This chapter describes the book’s survey methodology, including its approach to embedding experimental vignettes designed to identify the effects of foreign actors, discusses case selection, and provides background information on each of the cases.