Partisan Splits Over Election Integrity Widen Under Electoral Authoritarianism

Why This Question Matters

Paula Windecker, Ioannis Vergioglou, and Marc S. Jacob investigate how ordinary citizens assess the fairness of elections in regimes that hold multiparty contests but maintain authoritarian control. Electoral integrity is a cornerstone of democratic legitimacy; when elections persist in authoritarian settings, citizen perceptions can shape whether elections stabilize or undermine regime authority.

What the Authors Ask

Do supporters of incumbents and opposition voters perceive the integrity of elections differently in electoral authoritarian regimes compared with democracies? And are those perceptions durable when electoral competition suddenly becomes more salient?

Cross-Country Surveys and a Sudden Election Case

The authors analyze large cross-national public-opinion data to compare long-term differences in perceived electoral integrity across regime types. To capture a short-term reaction to heightened electoral stakes, they exploit the unexpected 2018 Turkish snap election announcement as an empirical test of whether sudden increases in electoral salience change citizens’ views.

Key Methods and Design

• Comparative analysis of survey responses on election fairness across democracies and electoral authoritarian regimes.
• A focused natural experiment-like test using the surprise 2018 Turkish snap election to observe short-term shifts in perceptions.

Main Findings

• The gap between government supporters and opposition supporters in perceptions of electoral integrity is substantially larger under electoral authoritarianism than under democratic rule.
• This partisan gap increases in systems undergoing autocratization, indicating widening perceptual divergence as regimes backslide.
• Short-term shocks—in this case the announcement of a snap election in Turkey—do not meaningfully reduce these partisan differences: perceptions remain largely stable even when electoral competition becomes highly salient.

What This Means for Authoritarian Legitimacy

The results suggest that incumbent narratives can successfully convince supporters that elections are fair in authoritarian settings, while opposition supporters view the same contests as biased or meaningless. Those asymmetric perceptions are durable and deepen during autocratization, with important consequences for how elites mobilize support and for the broader dynamics of regime legitimation and opposition contestation.