13 March 2014

The Election Process and Government Legitimacy

Eli Berman, Michael Callen, Clark Gibson, and James Long investigate the effect of reducing election fraud on voter perceptions of government legitimacy. They study an experiment involving randomly-assigned interventions that reduced vote fraud in Afghanistan. Increasing the integrity of elections is associated with an increase in the fraction of the local population that believes the police should resolve disputes, that believes their country is a democracy, and that would be prepared to report insurgent behavior to security forces.