How and Why Election Fraud Was Abolished in Established Western Democracies

Whereas most historical studies of democratization has concentrated on the extension of the suffrage, or how executives were made accountable to an elected parliament, there is still a dearth of knowledge on how old, established democracies developed the capacity to organize free and fair elections. In other words, we still lack systematic evidence on how election fraud was abolished historically. In this paper, drawing on systematic data on election petitions filed with the authorities, I compare the evolution of election fraud in four established Western democracies: Sweden, the US, Great Britain and France. I argue that the disappearance of election fraud cannot be explained by the choice of electoral rules, the structure of competition, socioeconomic modernization or shifts in economic inequality. Instead, the ebb and flow of electoral fraud should be understood as stemming from the combination of two forces: the professionalization of the bureaucracy and the extent to which elections were partisan. I conclude by discussing possible extensions of this arguments across time and space.