This Handbook was developed for electoral administrators and those involved in reforming EMBs. It provides comparative experience of and best practices on EMB structures and funding models, as well as means for evaluating performance. A range of case studies illustrate examples from specific contexts in Afghanistan, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Haiti, India, Kenya, the Republic of Korea, Liberia, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Senegal, Republic of Seychelles, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tunisia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States. This new and revised edition of the 2006 International IDEA Handbook includes updated country-level data and case studies and significantly expanded sections on the role of gender, professional development and technology in elections.

"This publication provides an inventory of United Nations jurisprudence relevant to electoral processes. It organizes and cross-references international law applicable to elections in order to make it accessible to national and international stakeholders. The Guidelines aspire to near-global applicability and focuses explicitly on national accountability and ownership, an essential tool for EMBs and national stakeholders engaged in electoral reforms. The focus on UN treaty obligations is meant to promote consistency, objectivity, impartiality, accuracy and professionalism in drafting and reviewing legal frameworks for elections. The Guidelines include tables of jurisprudence and checklists which facilitate review of how far national legal frameworks comply with UN treaty provisions and jurisprudence on elections."--

From Kosovo to Kabul, the last decade witnessed growing interest in ?electoral engineering?. Reformers have sought to achieve either greater government accountability through majoritarian arrangements or wider parliamentary diversity through proportional formula. Underlying the normative debates are important claims about the impact and consequences of electoral reform for political representation and voting behavior. The study compares and evaluates two broad schools of thought, each offering contracting expectations. One popular approach claims that formal rules define electoral incentives facing parties, politicians and citizens. By changing these rules, rational choice institutionalism claims that we have the capacity to shape political behavior. Alternative cultural modernization theories differ in their emphasis on the primary motors driving human behavior, their expectations about the pace of change, and also their assumptions about the ability of formal institutional rules to alter, rather than adapt to, deeply embedded and habitual social norms and patterns of human behavior.

An effective electoral justice system is a key element in the unfolding of a free, fair and genuine democratic process. Without a system to mitigate and manage inequality or perceptions of inequality, even the best management of an electoral process may lead to mistrust in the legitimacy of the elected government. This Handbook examines the concept of electoral justice and how to prevent electoral disputes. Using examples from countries such as Afghanistan, Argentina, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Burkina Faso, France, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States, it will assist any country with the design and implementation of an electoral justice system that best suits their situation.

Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.