Chapter 6 focuses on how the effects of foreign interventions depend on the identity of the intervener. It shows that in Tunisia and the United States, the presence of capable and unbiased monitors (not any monitors) increased election credibility. In Georgia, an unusually certain electoral environment, the same was true when the analysis focused only on individuals with significant uncertainty in their beliefs about election credibility. Intriguingly, in Tunisia, the monitors perceived as capable and unbiased were those from the Arab League. Returning to meddlers, Bush and Prather find that most respondents did not believe meddling was likely to affect the election results. If they did believe meddlers were capable, however, then they observe the predicted negative relationship with election credibility. Moreover, in a hypothetical scenario in which a foreign actor successfully meddled in a future election in Georgia, they find the expected decrease in election credibility. This chapter shows how dependent the effects of foreign actors are on beliefs about the actor’s capabilities and biases.

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.

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.

Chapter 2 develops the theoretical framework that Bush and Prather test later in the book. It posits that people form their beliefs about election. First, people desire to hold accurate beliefs about an election’s credibility. Second, they desire to hold beliefs about election credibility that are consistent with their partisan attachments. Given the accuracy motive, for foreign actors’ interventions to provide new information to the public about the electoral playing field, citizens must believe that foreign actors are capable and willing to influence it. And both accuracy and directional motivations point to vote choice as an essential moderating factor in terms of the effects of foreign actors on local trust. The predictions Bush and Prather develop contrast sharply with an alternative perspective on foreign interventions around elections that expects citizens to respond with hostility to any outside intervention due to their tendency towards nationalist backlash.

To conclude the book, this chapter considers the implications of the theory and findings for the political behaviors that are important to democracy, including voter turnout, and for scholarship on international relations and democratic backsliding. Bush and Prather discuss how the evidence presented in the book complicates the narratives scholars and others have told about how foreign actors shape local trust in elections. Without taking seriously the psychology of citizens, we cannot understand who the most vulnerable individuals in society are to the influence of foreign actors. This chapter also explores how the book’s theory might be expanded to incorporate the role played by elites and political parties in amplifying or diminishing foreign actors’ effects and the effects of other forms of international interventions on domestic politics. Finally, the authors conclude with thoughts on how foreign interventions in elections contribute to polarization and thus to some of the threats to democracy currently facing our world.

Foreign influences on elections are widespread. In the introduction, Bush and Prather explain how and why outside interventions influence local trust in elections. The chapters introduces the book’s theoretical framework and new survey evidence that will interest scholars, students, and practitioners who want to understand the conditions under which foreign actors enhance or undermine election integrity.

In Chapter 4, Bush and Prather begin testing the theory with respect to election monitoring. After discussing the ecology of international election monitors and showing general public acceptance of them, they find limited support for the hypotheses about average effects of monitors. In none of the book’s cases did information simply about the presence of international monitors increase trust in elections. Bush and Prather find more support for the conventional wisdom about the effects of monitors’ reports, as positive reports increased trust relative to negative reports in Tunisia and the United States. The substantive effect was fairly modest, however, and they do not find evidence that monitors’ reports had the same effect in Georgia.

In this chapter, Alexander Cooley details how Central Asian countries use the competing and overlapping infrastructure of external powers to consolidate their own domestic political standing. In the 2000s, after 9/11 and a string of “Color Revolutions,” Russia and China established themselves as alternative providers of public goods in a region hitherto seen as consisting in countries in “democratic transition” under US influence. Consequently, with alternative goods providers available, Central Asian countries themselves leveraged their relationship to the West to achieve political and economic aims and to push back against criticism about human rights abuses and authoritarian policies. Cooley’s example of how Russia deploys and supports alternative election observers to post-Soviet countries drives home the point that the rise of alternative providers and goods substitution has undermined US hegemony and eroded the policies, norms, and institutions of the US-led liberal international order. As the chapter demonstrates, these dynamics escalated very quickly in a region, originally categorized as “post-Communist,” at the outer boundary of the US-led Western sphere of influence.

This chapter discusses international observers and their efforts to improve the quality of elections. Elections are profoundly performative. They demand an audience, and since the late colonial period that audience has been in part an international one. Generations of political leaders, and civil servants, have sought to emphasise the disciplinary function of elections by reminding the public that “the eyes of the world” are upon them. The institutionalization of international election observation over the last thirty years has turned this gaze back upon the state itself: requiring and expecting behaviour in line with international norms. In the African context, though, international election observation has attracted more criticism than acclaim. We argue that this is because observers face two fundamental problems. The first is that observers’ very presence is part of the state effect of elections, conferring legitimacy, yet observers can only report critical opinions after the fact. This links to a second problem, which is that as observers respond to the numerous pressures they face they risk undermining their own credibility, especially among opposition supporters. Especially where elections have generally failed to deliver political change, this undermines the capacity of observers to encourage citizens and parties to play by the rules of the democratic game.