This book offers the first comparative monograph on the management of elections.

The book defines electoral management as a new, inter-disciplinary area and advances a realist sociological approach to study it. A series of new, original frameworks are introduced, including the PROSeS framework, which can be used by academics and practitioners around the world to evaluate electoral management quality. A networked governance approach is also introduced to understand the full range of collaborative actors involved in delivering elections, including civil society and the international community. Finally, the book evaluates some of the policy instruments used to improve the integrity of elections, including voter registration reform, training and the funding of elections. Extensive mixed methods are used throughout including thematic analysis of interviews, (auto-)ethnography, comparative historical analysis and, cross-national and national surveys of electoral officials.

This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners interested and involved in electoral integrity and elections, and more broadly to comparative politics, public administration, international relations and democracy studies.

Chapters 1 and 4 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Toby S. James is Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of East Anglia, UK.

PART I

Foundations

1 Introduction

2 A realist sociological approach

Performance

3 Existing concepts and evidence

4 Evaluating electoral management performance: the PROSeS framework

Networks

5 Electoral management governance networks

6 UK electoral management governance networks

7 Comparative electoral management governance networks

8 International electoral management governance networks

Instruments

9 Voter registration reform

10 Centralisation

11 Training and human resource practices

12 Austerity and financial investment in electoral management

Looking forward

13 Conclusions