The European Union is the second provider of Electoral Observation Missions (EOMs)
worldwide. It is partly to the credit of ‘Normative Power Europe’ that international
election monitoring has become an international norm. This paper develops a
framework which conceptualises EOMs as ‘dealers of legitimacy’ in a foreign political
marketplace, due to their ability to endorse or condemn (parts of) electoral processes.
This role of EOMs gives a particular importance to the question of their independence:
can they be subjected to interferences, why and through which processes? While
standardisation ensures a high level of neutrality throughout the span of EOMs,
significant glitches make them prone to episodic interest-driven interference. Based
on secondary literature and interviews with a range of practitioners, this paper
develops the argument of a ‘bureaucratic bias’ of a donor and democracy promoter,
which accounts for some of the breaches of EOM independence. This bias is linked to
the conditionality of development aid and the possibility of its suspension in case the
government in power loses too much international legitimacy – to which a negative
EOM report contributes. Policy recommendations include a modification of the final
phases of the EOM
