Fraud and Monitoring in Non-competitive Elections

This article develops a game-theoretic model that reconciles three facts: (1) fraud is pervasive in non-competitive elections, (2) domestic and international monitoring of elections have become nearly universal and (3) incumbent regimes often invite monitoring and still cheat. The incumbent regime commits fraud to manipulate the information generated by a non-competitive election before a political interaction with some audience. The audience expects fraud, so the incumbent commits fraud because she would appear weak if not doing so. Increasing the visibility of fraud with monitoring is valuable because it lowers the equilibrium level of costly fraud without changing how popular the incumbent appears. The core results hold under multiple extensions, which produce a rich set of comparative static results.