QoG lunchseminarium med Annekatrin Deglow

Abstract: In many weakly consolidated democracies, governments deploy security forces around elections, both to safeguard electoral integrity but, at times, also to boost their electoral fortunes. This presents a paradox: the state's coercive agents, best placed to ensure that citizens can vote free from fear and intimidation, may also pose the greatest threat to electoral integrity. This study examines how such dual roles shape public evaluations of election quality. We combine a multifactorial vignette experiment embedded in a post-election survey of 2,819 Nigerian citizens following the 2023 presidential election with qualitative evidence from focus group discussions. Our findings indicate that state behavior in the electoral environment, even when electoral security is pervasive and perceptions of the state's security forces are notoriously poor, has the potential to influence public opinion. Public ratings of election quality are highest when security forces address electoral irregularities with responses that align with norms of reasonable force. We also find that citizens prefer any intervention by security forces in the face of electoral violations, even when excessive, to inaction. Notably, ratings of the propriety of security force inaction are particularly low among individuals who do not belong to the regime's constituency, but these partisan biases in perceptions of state behavior do not undermine overall trust in election quality. With this, we shed light on the conditions under which state behavior in the electoral environment erodes or strengthens democratic legitimacy, and show that public trust in elections, even in highly polarized contexts, might be surprisingly resilient to partisan biases.