Introduction
This Focus on provides a global overview of electoral laws and regulations around the world. It focuses on nine aspects: legal framework, electoral management,
boundary delimitation, voter registration, political parties and candidates,
media, voting operations, vote counting and voter education. By employing a global comparative perspective the authors strive to identify common legal practices as well as the underlying causes of these practices.
Authors: André Blais and Agnieszka Dobrzynska
The present report examines the laws
that govern the conduct of elections around the world. The purpose is to indicate
what kind of regulations are most and least frequent and to point out some
factors that seem to be related to the adoption or non adoption of these rules.
Electoral laws matter. They define
what parties, citizens, groups, and the media are allowed or not allowed to do
or not to do, during the election campaign (or, sometime, even before) and on
Election Day, and they provide strategic incentives for the actors to behave in
certain ways (“Establishing the Rules of
the Game: Election Laws in Democracies”, Massicotte,
Blais and Yoshinaka 2004; “Making
Votes Count”, Cox 1997). It is impossible to make sense of how electoral
democracy functions if we do not know or understand the rules of the game.
Few people would challenge the idea
that democracy requires free elections. There is much less consensus, however,
when it comes to explicating what “free elections” really mean, and even more
debate when it comes to specifying which rules should be enacted to ensure that
an election be really “free”. This is so in good part because there are many
conceptions of democracy, each of which having distinct implications about what
kind of legislation should be adopted (“Democracy and
Elections”, Katz 1997).
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