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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