Lebanese parties are set to entrench electoral control

Headline LEBANON: Parties are set to entrench electoral control

Towards completing the puzzle: complexity of control by replacing, adding, and deleting candidates or voters

We investigate the computational complexity of electoral control in elections. Electoral control describes the scenario where the election chair seeks to alter the outcome of the election by structural changes such as adding, deleting, or replacing either candidates or voters. Such control actions have been studied in the literature for a lot of prominent voting rules. We complement those results by solving several open cases for Copeland$$^{\alpha }$$ α , maximin, k-veto, plurality with runoff, veto with runoff, Condorcet, fallback, range voting, and normalized range voting.

Elections, Fraud, and Democracy

This chapter examines the rapid swing from would-be authoritarian electoral control to democratic spring and back again. The end of the Second World War fostered the rise of democratic regimes across Latin America. In Mexico the shift was particularly marked for domestic reasons that included pent up demand, a powerful tradition of competitive politics and an increase in the level of violence necessary to rig elections. The emerging civilian elite consequently introduced under pressure primary elections inside the single party, which brought with them a new level of democratic representation. While elections remained flawed, committed voters could choose from a wide range of candidates and exercise a reliable veto power unpopular party choices. This was particularly the case in municipal elections, the ones that mattered most to voters. State and federal governments would let opposition victories stand when the cost of repression was too high. The ensuing polyarchy ended when the PRI ended primary elections in 1950. However the political genes and memories of representative local elections endured and were critical to the democratic transition of the later twentieth century.

Authoritarian election as an incentive scheme

Authoritarian rule requires teamwork of political elites. However, elite class members may lack incentive for the contribution of their efforts. In this paper, we develop a model to study the decision of authoritarian rulers to introduce elections. Our model suggests that elections can motivate the ruling class to devote more effort to public good provision. As a result, elections alleviate the moral-hazard-in-teams problem within the authoritarian government. Excessive electoral control hinders the introduction of elections, but mild electoral control facilitates it. Our findings offer a new perspective on understanding authoritarian elections and explain many stylized facts in authoritarian regimes.

Very Hard Electoral Control Problems

It is important to understand how the outcome of an election can be modified by an agent with control over the structure of the election. Electoral control has been studied for many election systems, but for all these systems the winner problem is in P, and so control is in NP. There are election systems, such as Kemeny, that have many desirable properties, but whose winner problems are not in NP. Thus for such systems control is not in NP, and in fact we show that it is typically complete for ∑p2 (i.e., NPNP, the second level of the polynomial hierarchy). This is a very high level of complexity. Approaches that perform quite well for solving NP problems do not necessarily work for ∑p2-complete problems. However, answer set programming is suited to express problems in ∑p2, and we present an encoding for Kemeny control.

State and regime capacity in authoritarian elections: Egypt before the Arab spring

Scholarship on electoral authoritarianism has increasingly recognized state capacity as an element enhancing electoral control. Building on such arguments, I examine the interaction between state capacity and regime strength in authoritarian elections. Drawing on empirical evidence from Egyptian elections under Mubarak, I show that the degree to which official regime candidates were able to profit from state penetration depended on the strength of the ruling party. In urban settings where party structures were stronger, service provision by the state helped secure the dominance of the hegemonic National Democratic Party; in rural constituencies where the party was weak, by contrast, service provision strengthened local elites who often ran and won against the party’s official candidates. This suggests that variation in regime capacity to channel political support needs to be taken into account when examining the relationship between state capacity and electoral control under authoritarianism.