Electoral Integrity amid the Covid-19 Pandemic: Public Perceptions and Expert Judgement

Electoral integrity matters. Despite the diffusion of democratic norms, upholding a "level playing field" is easier said than done in a world where electoral manipulation is widely practiced. The Covid-19 pandemic posed serious challenges to governance across regime types. Amid a state of emergency, lockdowns, and various restrictive measures, protests, boycotts, and violence throughout the electoral cycle further deepen existing political divides and undermine the public's trust in the electoral outcomes. This paper is intended to revisit the growing scholarly literature to consider how public opinion surveys and expert judgement help to reveal the concerns about the quality of the elections, as well as the challenges posed to upholding electoral integrity during the pandemic. Focusing on national elections that took place between February 2020 and May 2023, a period during which Covid-19 constituted a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern," we explore how one may take advantage of expert judgement on electoral integrity through both quantitative and qualitative methods and why research on public perceptions remains pertinent to theoretical and empirical research in this valuable field of study. To base the analysis on observational evidence, we turn to datasets including, but not limited to, the World Values Survey, the Asianbarometer Survey, Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM), and the Electoral Integrity Project to revisit how electoral integrity are defined and empirically examined. To the extent that the formation of public opinions towards electoral integrity are associated with the respondents’ socioeconomic status, partisanship, motivated reasoning, patronage, the losers’ discontent or political sensitivity, we submit that stronger agreements between expert judgement and public perceptions with respect to the quality of elections are more likely in liberal and electoral democracies; in contrast, elections in hybrid and autocratic regimes expose divergent assessments that are harder to reconcile due to the aforementioned sources of biases. Based on the findings, the inquiry recommends feasible ways to further improve the credibility of expert surveys, long-term and short-term election observation missions, and explores how public opinion research on electoral integrity may draw lessons from the developments of expert survey methods.