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Political Orientation, Information and Perceptions of Election Fraud: Evidence from Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2015

Graeme Robertson
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Abstract

Citizen perceptions of the extent of fraud in a given authoritarian election can differ widely. This article builds on the literature on information acquisition and processing in democracies to argue that much of this variation is due to the way in which citizens’ underlying political orientations affect both the kind of information they gather and how they process that information. These differences in information acquisition and processing have important implications for how election monitoring reports, access to the internet and other sources of information are likely to affect the stability of contemporary authoritarian regimes. The theory is tested using observational data and a survey experiment from the Russian presidential election of 2012.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 589 - 608
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (email: [email protected]). Data replication sets are available at http:dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS, and online appendices are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123415000356.

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