Policy-Making and Evaluation

Relations with the media are an important part of the communications strategy of an electoral management body, but they are not the only part.

The broader point is that EMBs do not work in isolation. Communicating their plans and decisions is an essential part of what makes an EMB effective. It is possible to organize the best elections in the world – but it is also necessary to be able to communicate. Or, to put it more precisely, if an EMB cannot communicate then it certainly will not organize the best elections in the world.

EMBs work in a constant cycle. Once a country has gone through its initial, transitional democratic election, it will be bound into an endless process of election organization: legislative (two houses perhaps), presidential, regional, local – even, in the case of Europe, international. There may be plebiscites or referenda. There may be votes on particular proposed laws. Democracy, in its nuts and bolts, is hard work. And the work does not stop.

The traditional phases of project management do not therefore sit easily with an EMB. It may be difficult to separate out planning, implementation and evaluation, when the next election begins almost before the last one is finished. Nevertheless, planning and evaluation are both an essential part of the process of organizing elections. Communication, in turn, is crucial to both.

Planning works much more effectively if other stakeholders are involved. One clear example relating to media and elections concerns the development of regulations and codes of conduct. These will work best when all those affected, particularly in this instance the media and political parties, are involved in the planning process. Another concerns timetables. It s important for both media and EMB to understand each other’s differing priorities and deadlines.

Communication is equally important in evaluation. There is a danger in organizational evaluation to focus on measuring outputs rather than impact. This is partly because this is much easier to achieve. There is little difficulty in using, for example, the number of press releases issued by an EMB’s media department as an indicator of effectiveness. The problem is that the press releases in themselves only show what has been put out, not what has been used and understood. Real effectiveness indicators are harder to develop and require communication and consultation with those affected. In that particular example a survey of media asking them the most effective forms for releasing news would be a more useful evaluative tool. Monitoring the media to see how far they made use of materials issued by the EMB might be even more effective.

A Process of Consultation

Organizing an election entails a constant process of communication. One of the most useful and effective forms of communication is consultation between the EMB and other stakeholders.

Key stakeholders in relation to the media role in elections include the following:

• The electoral management body itself.
• The media, including both editors and senior management, and ordinary journalists.
• Political parties and candidates.
• Non-governmental organizations, especially those responsible for defending media freedom or monitoring media output.
• Representatives of voters themselves, such as community organizations.

Here are two examples of how stakeholder consultations might work in practice.

Before the Tanzanian parliamentary elections of 2000, the Media Council convened a meeting of media, journalists, non-governmental groups concerned with media freedom and the national electoral commission. This gathering drew up a code of conduct for media coverage of the elections. The media Council and other NGOs then organized a media monitoring project that was aimed at determining how far the media complied with the code of conduct. It reported regularly throughout the campaign, before issuing a final report after the elections.

The final report was only released after a further consultation, involving all the same stakeholders, along with political parties and candidates. The monitoring findings were thoroughly debated and the code of conduct evaluated, with lessons drawn for future elections.

Before the Zimbabwean elections of 2002, the Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe convened a stakeholder consultation to try to develop proposals for a system of direct access by political parties to the media. Media, political parties, the EMB and NGOs were invited, along with many community organizations such as residents’ associations and trade unions. The meeting was widely attended – but unfortunately not by the EMB or by the ruling party. MMPZ had developed a paper offering a series of options for different possible direct access systems. These were thoroughly debated and a set of proposals finally agreed by consensus. In this case, however, the absence of the EMB and one of the main political parties meant that the proposals could not be adopted.