Which elections can be lost

Abstract The concept of electoral competition is relevant to a variety of research agendas in political science, yet the question of how to measure electoral competition has received little direct attention. We revisit the distinction proposed by Giovanni Sartori between competition as a structure or rule of the game and competitiveness as an outcome of that game, and argue that to understand which elections can be lost (and therefore when parties and leaders are potentially threatened by electoral accountability), scholars may be better off considering the full range of elections where competition is allowed and we provide a dataset of all elections with competition between 1945 and 2006. We outline the pitfalls of other measures used by scholars to define the potential for electoral competition, and show why such methods are likely to lead to biased or incomplete findings on which elections are more likely to be lost. The argument is illustrated with a simple model, followed by the introduction of new global data on elections and the minimal conditions necessary for electoral competition, and with empirical illustrations of the advantages of the proposed approach

Defining the playing field: A framework for analysing fairness in access to resources, media and the law

The playing field is a concept often used to describe level of fairness in electoral competition. With Levitsky and Way’s definition of the playing field as a case in point, this paper takes a critical look at existing work on the playing field, arguing that current conceptualizations suffer from lacking conceptual logic, operationalization and measurement. A new and disaggregated framework that can serve as the basis for future research on the playing field is then proposed. This framework is applied to an illustrative case study on the development of the playing field in Zambia under MMD rule, thereby demonstrating that it is able to capture both the changing nature of the playing field and the differing mechanisms at play to a larger degree than the framework put forth by Levitsky and Way. The 2011 elections in Zambia also clearly highlight the importance of conceptually and empirically separating the slope of the playing field from its impact on both the opposition and electoral outcomes