Contentious Elections

With more than half of the world's countries claiming to be democratic, measuring the quality of democracy has never been more important. In this timely book, Norris, Frank and Martinez i Coma examine elections in which the result has been contested. Their findings are significant, and relevant to anyone who considers electoral integrity to be a core democratic value. -Ian McAllister, Australian National University, Australia. Contentious Elections is an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on election integrity, and a must-read for anyone interested in the dynamics of elections, protest and conflict. Bringing together a wide variety of empirical evidence from around the globe, Contentious Elections provides novel insights into the causal links connecting election integrity to legitimacy, electoral protests, and ultimately, election violence. The book argues that elections are neither universal peace-creators nor always spark war, but rather demonstrates that whether elections consolidate peace or trigger conflict depends on political, institutional and socio-economic conditions in which elections take place, providing important insights useful for researchers and policy-makers alike. - Carolien van Ham, University of New South Wales, UK. Elections can trigger challenges and protests, sometimes becoming violent, when outcomes are contested. In this major new work, the implications of shortcomings in electoral integrity that provoke such challenges are examined in a broadly comparative framework by Norris and her colleagues. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, contentious elections carry risks that need to be better understood by both scholars and practitioners. First rate, policy relevant, research on a fundamentally important topic. - Lawrence LeDuc, University of Toronto, Canada.