Abstrakt
Elections are fundamental to democracy. Over the last decades researchers have extensively studied various aspects of an electoral game such as behavior of voters and candidates or impact of different voting rules on outcomes and efficiency.
Though the approaches taken to analyzing elections are incredibly diverse, almost all of them share one common feature: it is assumed that elections are well-functioning mechanisms for converting public preferences into social choice, and that the outcomes of elections are fully determined by votes casted for the candidates. However, in reality fraud has become an integral part of electoral competition in both established democracies and less-than-democratic regimes, despite tremendous efforts exerted by international organizations to ensure transparency in elections.
In recent years, both economists and political scientists have started to pay closer attention to elections that lack integrity, but there are still plenty of open questions on all sides of the electoral game in a fraudulent context. In my dissertation I study various aspects of electoral fraud, both theoretically and empirically, to answer some of them.