Individual Responses to International Democratizing Action (IRIDA)

This project investigated foreign interventions in elections. It had three broad aims: developing a theoretically sound definition of foreign interventions in elections, building a theory about their occurrence, and collecting data to test these arguments. We first conceptualised different types of outside democratising actions: evaluations (whether electoral competition functioned in a desirable manner) and interventions (support for  specific candidates and conditioning benefits on the content of the evaluation). We developed a theory of how the different combinations of actions affect individual attitudes towards the state of democratic rights, towards political parties, and towards the outside actor/s. The theory suggests that a respondents’ attitude towards the governing party and towards the foreign actor, together with the expectation of benefits from agreeing with the outsider’s position, dictate individual responses. We collected original and novel data on process and candidate interventions for samples of countries in Europe and the World. One core finding is that political polarisation in target countries, alongside the constellation of interested outsiders, explain intervention strategies.