Abstracts Submission

Broad public acceptance of the legitimacy of election results is an essential feature of democracy. However, the mechanics of administering elections can never be exactly perfect, and some elites—particularly losers of elections—may have incentives to raise doubts about the legitimacy of electoral processes and election results. Election administration, elite rhetoric, news media environment, social media, campaign finance rules, electoral systems, and other factors may interact in shaping public confidence in elections and perceptions of electoral integrity.

This issue aims to expand our understanding of how these and other factors contribute to what public confidence in elections means. This presents several questions to address, including but not limited to:

• Do election integrity concerns matter less for different electoral systems, lower-order elections, or non-candidate elections (e.g., referendums initiatives)?
• What relationships may there be between districting, apportionment, and electoral integrity/confidence in elections?
• How can public confidence in elections be measured in a way that aids comparison, and what explains variation in confidence at the individual level and cross-nationally?
• What are the consequences of robust public confidence in election results, and the consequences of reduced confidence in election results?
• Are there demonstrated effective methods of educating, “pre-bunking,” or “inoculating” the public from misinformation associated with reduced confidence in election results?
• Is there evidence that better quality of election management, particular laws or reforms, can build confidence in elections among winners and losers alike?

We invite submissions from a range of methodological approaches, including but not limited to analysis of cross-national survey data, multi-level modeling, survey experiments, field experiments, case studies, comparative case studies, and qualitative analysis.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Politics and Governance is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 90 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.