Making Electoral Truth. National Controversies and Global Circulations – VERELECT

This project aims to analyse in a comparative and transnational perspective the making of “political truth” as the publicly expressed concord regarding the rules of political competition and, consequently, the electoral results. Denouncing irregularities is at the heart of political competition in many countries, and questions on the validity of ballots are at the heart of democratic legitimacy: despite the increasing role of experts proceeding from NGOs to IOs and while elections have never been as technicalized and controlled, they appear increasingly contested. This paradox is at the heart of the theoretical questioning of this project. Our comparative investigation will be based on long term troubled fields (the United States, Mexico, Kenya) and fields where electoral conflicts have appeared more recently (Egypt, Turkey, Uganda). Focus will also be set on the circulation of norms.

Our first hypothesis results from this paradox: following both logics of cooperation and competition, the many actors who take part in the organisation and the control of elections - political parties, electoral bureaucracies, national and international experts, judges - often contribute to questioning the results. Considering themselves as the “guardians of democracy”, they organize themselves as professionals of denunciation and electoral deviance. They also bear competing visions - both technical and moral - of what a “good election” should be. In so doing, these multiple actors contribute to undermining the credibility of the election through a permanent questioning of this essential democratic legitimation mechanism.

The second hypothesis deals with the circulation of norms and practices in electoral politics: some countries subject to longlasting electoral conflictuality have been active in the construction of a field of international experts. This is the case of Mexico for example. Additionally, some electoral technologies (biometric identification, e-voting systems, voting machines, electronic transmission of results…) are developed and sold by private and foreign companies. As such they are subject to commercial logics and sometimes corrupt transactions. Logics of circulation and dissemination intertwine and respond to diverse investments, which place the question of electoral materiality at the heart of international democratic expertise. The social construction of “electoral transparency” is thus at the core of a technological and expert debate in which interests are multiple.
Against this hyper professionalisation of the electoral act, the third hypothesis relates to a form of vernacularisation of election: groups of affinities but also groups with diverse interests doing political targeting seize electoral stakes, feed controversies, sometimes produce alternative facts/truth and promote them widely, in particular on social medias. Such oppositions and the production of alternative truth are not only the result of party logics but may respond to often much more complex logics that constitute one of the lines of investigation of the project.