1 Partners in Defending Democracy: Regional Intergovernmental Organizations And Opposition Mobilization after Flawed Elections

Ashley Leeds for helpful comments on various versions of this project. I also gratefully acknowledge the United States Institute of Peace for the Peace Scholars Dissertation Fellowship that supported this research. 2 In the post-cold war era, elections have become the central front in the battle for democracy. Political change following flawed elections—either through institutional reform, a negotiated settlement or alternation in power—is now the modal form of democratization. In recent years, regional intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have come to play a high-profile role in flawed elections by monitoring electoral conduct, pressuring manipulating incumbents to clean up their acts, and mediating negotiations between the government and opposition. But analysts disagree as to whether international actors play a causal role in promoting democratic change, or whether they simply choose to involve themselves in cases with already favorable domestic conditions, chief among them, the presence of a strong, mobilized opposition. This paper provides a theory, tested with systematic, quantitative evidence, showing that the relationship between regional IGO involvement, opposition mobilization and democratic change following flawed elections is causal, not coincidental. The theory accounts for the strategic dynamics between the domestic opposition and the IGO, illuminating how, under certain conditions, the IGO helps mobilize and empower the opposition. Using a new dataset of opposition mobilization and IGO democracy promotion following flawed elections in Latin America and the post-communist region, I present statistical evidence that opposition mobilization and IGO involvement, both alone, but especially in combination, significantly increase the likelihood of democratic change in the wake of flawed elections.