5 - Meddlers’ Effects

Summary

Bush and Prather turn to election meddling in Chapter 5. Similar to Chapter 4 for monitors, the chapter begins with descriptive information about election meddling and its prevalence, as well as showing substantial public concern about it globally. The authors further demonstrate that across all three countries in our study, individuals who believed foreign actors had a negative influence on elections had lower levels of electoral trust in their elections. But the book’s experiments again offer only limited support for the conventional wisdom. The treatments priming individuals about election meddling either had no effect on perceptions of election credibility or only had an effect when the experiments were able to reassure people that meddling had not occurred. In summary, Chapters 4 and 5 do not offer a great deal of support for the conventional wisdom. But the authors show in Chapters 6 and 7 that these analyses of the overall effects of foreign interventions mask considerable variation.