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This chapter explores how the Korean electoral management bodies (EMBs) and the election administration ensure the autonomy of administrative management from political parties and the interior ministry. In particular, the analysis focuses on the role of recognition, rights independence, and professionalism in securing the election administrations in the EMBs. Recent studies have found that the contents of the independent variable, dependent variable, and other parameters influencing fair and autonomous election management system do not differ significantly. Therefore, the institutional independence of the EMBs is not intended to guarantee fairness and impartiality in Korea either. Since 1987, the authoritarian regime collapsed and democracy began to grow in Korea. Also, the role of the EMBs granted by the constitution started to be considered.

Actively recognizing the role and expanding the rights of the Korean National Election Commission (NEC) has become a decisive factor in the formation of the autonomous and neutral election management system. The scale, manpower and budget of organizations, and personnel have increased. The role of the EMBs has also expanded proportionally. The Korean NEC has enormous authority, such as investigative power and enforcement power that the EMBs of other countries do not have. After all, recognizing the role of bureaucracy and government employees will become a very important factor in ensuring the independence of the EMBs in developing countries. Furthermore, it will be a driving force to develop democracy in developing countries.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of using proportional representation system on the fragmentation of the party system in the Algerian political system within the period from 1997 to 2017, in which Algeria has experienced five legislative elections regularly every five years by testing a hypothesis about adopting the proportional representation system on the basis of the closed list during the foregoing legislative elections has obviously influenced the exacerbation of the Algerian party system’s fragmentation, compared to other factors.

The essence of the theoretical framework of this study is to address the effect of the electoral system as an independent variable on the party system as a dependent variable. The starting point for that framework is to reassess the “Duverger’s law,” which appeared since the early 1950s and has influenced the foregoing relationship, and then to review the literature on a new phase that tried to provide a more accurate mechanism for determining the number of parties and their relative weight, whether in terms of electoral votes or parliamentary seats. This means that researchers began to use a measure called the effective number of parties (ENP) for Laakso and Taagepera since 1979. The study elaborates the general concepts of the electoral system and the party system. It used Laakso, Taagepera index of the “ENP” to measure the phenomenon of fragmentation party during the five legislative elections from 1997 to 2017 in Algeria.

The results of the study reveal that the proportional representation electoral system – beside other factors – had clear impacts on the fragmentation of the Algerian party system by all standards, whether on the level of the apparent rise in the number of the parties represented in the Algerian parliament from 10 parties in 1997 election to 36 parties in 2017 election or according to the index of Laakso and Taagepera (ENP). The average number of effective number of electoral parties in the five elections was around 7.66, and the average number of effective number of parliamentary parties in the five elections was around 4.39, which puts Algeria in an advanced degree of the fragmentation of the party system.

This study about the phenomenon of the fragmentation of the party system, which is one of the new subjects in the field of comparative politics – globally and in the Arab world. Hence, the value of this study aims to shed light on this mysterious area of science, the fragmentation of the party system in the Algerian political system during the period from 1997 to 2017.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the readiness of Ugandans to accept electronic voting under the restrictive conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A semi-structured questionnaire, built on a five-point-Likert scale with responses ranging from 1 – strongly disagree to 5 – strongly agree was used to get quantifiable data from four main electoral stakeholders i.e. the policymakers, urban and semi-urban youth, rural voters and government officials. These stakeholders were purposively and conveniently selected because of the influential roles they play in promoting electoral democracy in Uganda. Using a cross-sectional survey design, the authors adopted correlational and quantitative research designs to collect and analyse data. Data was collected from a maximum sample size of 384 as recommended by Krejcie and Morgan (1970) from which 252 useful responses (65.6% response rate) were obtained. Using a statistical package for social scientists version 21.0, the authors performed a Pearson correlation coefficient to determine the relationships between study variables and linear regression analysis to predict the readiness of the stakeholders to accept e-voting more especially under the constraints caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

There was a positive significant relationship between perceived usefulness (PU) and attitude towards adoption, perceived ease of use and attitude towards adoption, attitude and readiness and finally trust propensity and readiness. The regression results show that 65% of the variations in readiness to adopt e-voting can be explained by perceived ease of use, PU, trust propensity and attitude towards adoption. Attitude towards adopting e-voting accounts for the highest variations in the model followed by trust propensity and finally PU. However, perceived ease of use was found to be insignificant.

The study was limited to only PU, perceived ease of use, trust propensity, attitudes towards using/adoption and readiness to accept e-voting amidst the COVID-19 strict conditions. In Africa, electoral democracy can be influenced by a number of factors such as finances, education levels, sectarianism, voter rigging, perceived risk, political and economic environment. These were not taken into consideration yet they would affect the stakeholders’ attitudes and perceptions which would directly or indirectly affect the adoption of electronic voting.

Given the low levels of technology infrastructure in the country, there is a general low uptake of technology-oriented systems. The internet reach is low and quality is poor whilst the radio and televisions network is limited to a few urban settings, poor quality technology systems such as the recently acquired voter biometric systems and the constant government actions to switch off the internet and social media whenever there are contentious political issues. These inadequacies together with the restrictive COVID-19 conditions have compromised the participation of stakeholders which dents the stakeholders’ readiness to accept e-voting which consequently compromises electoral democracy in the country. Therefore, government, electoral observers, the international community and civil society organizations need to accelerate the technology infrastructure development in the country, training and development of technical skills and competences, as well as mass mobilization on the use of technology-oriented platforms aimed at promoting electoral democracy. The country should come up with ICT policies and regulations that encourage the use of ICT in areas that promote democracy. These may include; the use of an easy e-voting system such as emails and voting via the post office. Also, Lawmakers, civil society organizations and the international community should make it punitive for anyone who disenfranchises people through internet disconnection, denial of access to broadcast, print and online media. These interventions will restore peoples’ attitudes and perceptions towards electronic voting, consequently increasing their levels of participation in the electioneering process.

The Ministry of Health, the Uganda Police Force and other security agencies have come out strongly to enforce the COVID-19 standard operating procedures which among others include the banning of political gatherings, processions and meetings of any kind. As a remedy, the Electoral Commission is encouraging political parties, electoral candidates, voters and other stakeholders to use technology-oriented systems such as mobile phones, broadcast and print media, the internet and others to reach out to the electorate. With the government in full control of all these electronic, print and broadcast media, having previously switched them off during the 2011 and 2016 polls consequently disenfranchising many people from their democratic rights, it remains unknown the extent to which the electorate is ready to accept and appreciate scientific voting more so during this time when restrictions against COVID-19 are not making it any better for the voters and other key participants to carry out their political and civil activities.

Given that female candidates benefit more from an election based on a proportional representation system as opposed to a plurality system and the extent of corruption may not change much across a crude classification of electoral systems, this study attempts to connect the level of corruption to the proportion of female legislators by introducing the electoral rules as an instrument for the latter variable.

This paper uses electoral rules as an instrument for the elected women to clarify the causality of women on corruption since a country with a high number of female legislators may simply have superior economic performance, which may reveal a simultaneous preference for gender equality and clean government. Section 2 describes the relationships between corruption and women. Section 3 provides the empirical specification by first building a channel from the electoral rules to elected women and then investigating the influence of female legislators on the level of corruption. This section also provides a description of the data. Section 4 presents the results of the analysis. Section 5 concludes.

The results show that having more women in parliament results in more honest government, which is very likely to be causally evident.

This study investigates whether more seats taken by female parliamentarians results in a less corrupt government. While a large and growing body of research on this issue claims that there is a link between a higher level of female representation in government and lower levels of corruption, it is uncertain if a causal relationship can be established. This study attempts to provide evidence by building a channel from electoral rules and gender quotas to the fraction of female legislators, while consequently investigating the impact of female legislators on corruption. Based on the countries contained in this study, the results suggest that the presence of female parliamentarians apparently has a significantly negative effect on the level of corruption, which is very likely to be causally evident.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate EU election data for the UK and Germany and examine the influence of promotional activity (party campaigning) and the different voting systems prevailing in these two countries – first past the post (FPTP) in the UK and proportional representation (PR) in Germany – on voter turnout.

The paper takes the form of a binomial logistic regression analysis of individual‐level survey data from the European Election Studies (EES) archive.

The findings suggest a general link between electoral systems, party campaigning and voter turnout. Individuals are more likely to turn out under PR systems, while “party campaigning” – including door‐to‐door canvassing and leafleting – also had a substantial positive effect on self‐reported turnout.

The structure of the EES survey questions means that it is impossible to separate out which mode of campaigning (impersonal or face‐to‐face) is driving the observed strong positive relationship between the variable “party campaigning” and voter turnout. More survey research should be carried out to tease out which specific types of promotional activity have more of an influence on voter turnout. In addition, aggregate level research on campaigning patterns across countries with different voting systems would be helpful to explore this phenomenon in more depth.

While research has been undertaken within the context of specific countries such as the UK, USA and New Zealand, there appears to have been no research reported within the context of the EU.

This chapter is about non-western immigrants’ representation in elected assemblies in Norway and Denmark. Non-western immigrants are a small minority in these countries. That may be a difficult position since democracy is based on different forms of majority rule. Every democracy faces the dilemma of how to treat minorities. The checks on direct power from the majority vary from one country to another. One aspect is the electoral system, which may or may not have built-in mechanisms that defend minorities.

This study aims to examine the associations between socioeconomic status, types of rigging (pre- polling-day and post-), politics and voting behavior, vote casting and perceptions of rigging in Pakistan’s most recent elections, and attitudes toward electoral integrity.

Data were collected from students at three different universities. In all, 748 units of analysis (488 male and 260 female) recorded their responses by means of a self-structured questionnaire. Linear regression was applied to measure the associations between variables, and the reliability and validity of the scales were tested.

A significant relationship was found between pre-poll rigging, post-poll rigging, politics and voting behavior, socioeconomic characteristics (i.e. age, education, father’s education, background or place of residence and monthly household incomes), the perception of rigging in the last elections and attitudes toward electoral integrity.

Pakistan’s history has been blemished by electoral malpractices during both de facto and de jure regimes. Attention has formerly been paid to either polling-day or post-election rigging. The relationship of electoral integrity with different factors explored in this study have usually been ignored or overlooked. The findings of this study would help policy-makers, youth experts and academicians to reorient their behaviors to strengthen political stability, the rule of law and the continuation of democracy via their participation in the system.

To the researchers’ best knowledge, there has not been a single peer-reviewed study of Pakistan which has explored the associations between the variables examined for this study. The main academic challenge the researchers faced was to find a standardized and contextualized scale or tool to explore how different types of vote-rigging affected attitudes toward electoral integrity. Thus, the structured scales for types of rigging and electoral integrity developed here would be useful for future studies in the field of electoral integrity in democratic countries.