Electoral Governance

There is enormous variation in how elections are run around the world. One stark choice has always been the chosen electoral system, but this has also long been true of other aspects of the electoral process, such as voter registration, campaign financing, and processes for receiving electoral justice. All these choices can have profound consequences for who wins the contest, confidence in the electoral process, as well as peace, security, and conflict resolution. So, who decides on how elections are run? Incumbent governments? Citizens? Or multinational ICT companies and social media platforms? Unfortunately, there are insufficient conceptual and analytical tools available for answering these questions and comparing political systems. This chapter, therefore, proposes governance network analysis to explain this puzzle. Electoral governance is defined as the decision-making process for determining how elections are run. It involves the analysis of the network of actors involved in setting the rules for running elections, the degree of contestation and the power relationships between them. This new concept is built on research on policy studies and theories of governance to identify the nature of the policy network in terms of the range of actors, degree of contestation, and power imbalances. A case study of changing patterns of electoral governance in Lesotho is used to illustrate the utility of the approach and set out the research agenda ahead.