The Effects of Electoral Bodies Autonomy in the Elections Cleanliness: the Latin America Case

Abstract

Democratic systems have regular elections, which supposes the existence of one or more organisms in each nation in charge of organizing the elections. Electoral governance is supposed to have an impact on the quality of the processes and democracy itself. Formally, the integration and composition of the electoral bodies generate differences due to the number of management bodies, the duration of their mandates, the way in which their members are selected, their level of professionalization and links with parties and the government, their condition of autonomy and financial sufficiency, their capacity for legislative initiative and the level of involvement of the political parties in their decisions for the organization of the elections. In practice, it is essential to review and verify the effective existence, meaning and magnitude of the impact of electoral bodies and their autonomy regarding issues related to the quality of processes and democracy in Latin American nations. For this, it is necessary to resort to one of the most complete sources of information to conceptualize and measure democracy in the countries of the world through the compilation of a multidimensional and disaggregated set of data that aims to reflect the complexity of the phenomenon: the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, which provides indices on democracy and electoral cleanliness and indicators on the autonomy and sufficiency of electoral bodies by country and year, which can be crossed with indicators for each election on electoral participation, vote buying and other irregularities, government intimidation and other forms of violence, as well as acceptance of defeat, in addition to an estimator of cleanliness and perceived freedom in each process. The exploitation of these data and the analysis of the relationship between the indicators by election and the annual estimators for the region will be the task that we will address in this paper.