Clifford Levy’s article on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times argued that while Putin likes the results of the Ukrainian elections, he was less enthused by its process: much too free and fair. Suppose for a moment that Levy is right (the evidence is anecdotal at best), what could explain Putin’s attitude? The conventional explanation implicit in the article is that this strengthens an international norm of free and fair elections thus making violating that norm more costly for Putin. In this theory, the relatively free and fair elections in the Ukraine have a spillover effect: they increase the pressure on Russia to also hold free and fair elections. As Dan Drezner points out, this argument is based on some rather tenuous assumptions.
Another explanation would be similar to the “bad ass theory of dictatorship” I blogged about last week. If you are an authoritarian leader, you may want to hold and win elections that obviously violate norms of free and fair elections to show that you can indeed withstand the cost of international opprobrium. Winning elections the free and fair way signals weakness and a willingness to entertain giving up on power. Putin would rather have a strong than a weak leader in Ukraine (as long as that leader is generally friendly to Russia). I am not necessarily saying that this is what Putin is thinking in this case or even that the CAT (which the dictatorship article was about) is necessarily a good example of this type of dynamic. Yet, unlike some of the commenters on the original blog post, it strikes me as not just counterintuitive but also quite plausible that international (legal) norms that intend to do good may have perverse effects of this kind. This doesn’t mean that these norms are welfare reducing, just that we should entertain that they may have unintended consequences in individual instances.
Update: Alberto Simpser of the University of Chicago has some work in progress that makes an argument that is not dissimilar. Simpser is interested in explaining why authoritarian regimes not just manipulate elections but do so by buying many more votes than they need if all they cared about was winning. Aside from a model, the paper also has some interesting data on manipulated elections. The abstract is below the fold.
Why do politicians manipulate elections excessively? The conventional wisdom associates electoral manipulation with close elections and small margins of victory. In fact, however, many manipulated elections are won by overwhelming margins of victory, and some elections are manipulated even though the result is scarcely in doubt. I present a theory about the incentives that shape electoral manipulation under conditions that often characterize developing countries. The central idea is that in such settings, electoral manipulation, in addition to directly affecting vote totals, can influence expectations and consequently impact patterns of political participation. This simple idea goes a long way toward explaining observed patterns: When large-scale manipulation can help to deter opponents in the future, politicians may purposefully use it beyond the point necessary for victory. Evidence from a variety of regions and time periods suggests that large-scale manipulation and overwhelming margins of victory have often had such an effect.