The Global Electoral Integrity Report 2024 has been published by the Electoral Integrity Project.
The report evaluates election quality around the world finds that elections in Sweden, Austria and Denmark hold contests which most empowers their citizens.
The Electoral Integrity Global Report is published each year to provide data on election quality based on expert opinion. The new release adds 42 new contests to the PEI dataset based on contests held in 2023. This report explores in more detail eight key contests in 2023: general elections in Zimbabwe, Turkey, Argentina, Nigeria, and Thailand, the presidential election in Egypt, and legislative elections in the Netherlands and Poland.
Like in previous years, indicators of the integrity of the campaign environment were the lowest scoring stages of the electoral cycle, with campaign finance and campaign media again at the bottom. Among the four key principles of electoral integrity, the deliberative environment likewise averaged the lowest scores. Election procedures, the vote count, and the results stages of the electoral cycle were on average the top-scoring.
The release of the data also presents a number of changes to the methodology of aggregating the overall indices – which are widely used by international policy makers and academics. This follows a move to measure electoral integrity in terms of whether elections empower citizens and deliver democracy. There are now some additional questions in the survey designed to capture whether elections achieve this. This represents theoretical work which will be published in a forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press.