Monitors and Meddlers: How Foreign Actors Influence Local Trust in Elections

Foreign influences on elections are widespread. Although foreign interventions around elections differ markedly-in terms of when and why they occur, and whether they are even legal-they all have enormous potential to influence citizens in the countries where elections are held. Bush and Prather explain how and why outside interventions influence local trust in elections, a critical factor for democracy and stability. Whether foreign actors enhance or diminish electoral trust depends on who is intervening, what political party citizens support, and where the election takes place. The book draws on diverse evidence, including new surveys conducted around elections with varying levels of democracy in Georgia, Tunisia, and the United States. Its insights about public opinion shed light on why leaders sometimes invite foreign influences on elections and why the candidates that win elections do not do more to respond to credible evidence of foreign meddling.

• Studies multiple types of foreign influences on elections, including international election monitoring and illegal forms of election interference, using the same framework
• Draws on extensive original public opinion surveys conducted in countries with varying levels of democracy
• Tests the conventional wisdom about how foreign actors influence citizens

About the Author

Sarah Sunn Bush is associate professor of political science at Yale University. She is the author of The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion Does Not Confront Dictators (Cambridge, 2015) and has held fellowships at the Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania, the Harvard Kennedy School, and Uppsala University.

Lauren Prather is associate professor of political science in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of several publications appearing in such journals as American Political Science Review and International Organization, and received the Hellman Fellowship from University of California, San Diego in 2018.