The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma: Why Election Monitoring Became an International Norm

This book tackles an interesting puzzle: Why would pseudo-democrats invite international election observers and cheat in front of them if getting caught is costly? A norm has developed because of leaders' attempts to signal to the international community their democratic credentials, even if they are not really committed to democracy. Susan D Hyde establishes a strategic tension for pseudo-democrats that is straightforward and compelling, and she provides an impressive array of empirical evidence to support her claims: cross-national time-series data, within-country experimental evidence, and qualitative accounts from hundreds of observer reports. The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma is a must-read for those interested in elections and the development of norms.

The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma offers a brilliant and groundbreaking theory of how, over time, individual strategic state actions unintentionally can generate and diffuse new international norms. With a powerful analytical model, methodological sophistication and careful attention to historical nuance and detail, Susan D. Hyde not only explains the rise of international election monitoring but also offers a compelling general account of why states now accept a host of intrusive external practices that directly violate their sovereignty.

In The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma, Susan D. Hyde investigates the spread of international election observation, even to countries that hold less-than-democratic elections. This spread, Hyde persuasively contends, can only be explained if we understand the very consequential signal sent by incumbent leaders to the international community by allowing their elections to be observed. This book make a major contribution to the study of international election observation and to our understanding of democracy promotion more generally.

Susan D. Hyde has produced a theoretically elegant and empirically rigorous account of the relatively rapid and nearly universal spread of election monitoring. Her signaling theory of norm diffusion is a novel and important contribution to our understanding of how a new practice can become a global standard, and she tests and elaborate her theory using a variety of methods, including the first-ever randomized field experiments assessing the effects of monitoring. The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma is a model for how careful social science can be brought to bear on contemporary policy issues.

This is a first-rate book. It is well written, well argued, thorough, creative, and, on top of it all, presents a theory about something that is of great practical and theoretical interest. Susan D. Hyde accounts for the rise of the international norm of election monitoring as the result of leaders' desire to signal to the international community their democratic credentials, even if they are not real democrats. The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma is an example of truly theoretically informed empirical research, in which the author invokes the best available methods to subject her theory to tests.