7 - Individual Vote Choice

Summary

Chapter 7 explores how monitors’ and meddlers’ effects are conditional on individuals’ vote choice. Bush and Prather show across the three countries they study that winners were much more likely than losers to view the election as credible. The question then in terms of theory is whether winners and losers responded differently to the information they provided about foreign electoral interventions. In terms of monitoring, they find that positive information about monitors’ presence and complimentary reports did not reassure losers, who were much more receptive to negative information from monitors’ critical reports. The evidence can be interpreted as consistent with individuals forming beliefs in both accuracy- and directionally driven ways. Similarly, the book’s meddling experiments never caused election winners to lose trust, although they did have such an effect on election losers. Moreover, election losers were much more likely to believe in the existence of foreign meddling and its success to begin with. Overall, these results are sobering since democracy depends on the consent of election losers and a commitment among election winners to the rules of the game.