Q&A with Svitlana Chernykh
This guest author post is a Q&A with Svitlana Chernykh, author of the new book The Dilemma of Compliance: Political Parties and Post-Election Disputes, from the University of Michigan Press. The book is available in hardcover, paperback, and open access.
What inspired you to write The Dilemma of Compliance?
I started thinking about the project for the first time in 2005, after observing elections and post-election protests in Ukraine in late 2004. It was hard not to notice that the events in Ukraine were not unique and that post-election disputes seemed to take place in some countries but not others. By then we, of course, had also witnessed post-election disputes in Georgia in 2003. Ukraine was followed by Kyrgyzstan in 2005. I also noticed that not all parties rejected election results. I wanted to know more about when elections were disputed, by which parties, and most importantly, how? When do parties decide to use legal avenues to reject election outcomes and when do they resort to extra-legal ones, such as post-election protests?
My interest in the project further increased after observing the aftermath. Successful post-election disputes, those that led to changes in government, drew a lot of attention and, most importantly, created huge expectations about democratisation in these countries. However, more frequently than not, these expectations were not met. I wanted to know why, to better understand the events and how they related to the existing theories of democratisation.
In your research, you collected post-election responses from 270 elections held in 22 countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union! What was it like to work with so much data?
I absolutely love working with data. I think the process of collecting original data is a long and tiresome one but it is so rewarding. The data collection process can be sometimes overwhelming. But it taught me important organisational skills as well as allowed me to answer new, previously unexplored research questions.
Data is usually collected to answer a particular research question or to undertake a specific research project with defined goals and variables in mind. As a result, when researchers start asking new research questions or developing new measures, existing datasets may make it difficult to address them. These situations may require collecting new, original data. This was the case with the questions I was asking in this book. Existing dataset had data on post-election protests. But we did not have data on other strategies parties can use to reject election results. We also had data for post-election protests at the election level but not at the party level.
Collection of original data gives an unprecedented insight into the processes or phenomenon of interest. I learned tremendously about post-election disputes from coding different cases and digging into the histories of different political parties and elections. Therefore, I think collecting and working with a large original dataset made me a better scholar and allowed me to acquire very important research skills. But most importantly, it allowed me to better understand post-election disputes.
What was the most challenging part of writing the book?
Time. Finding time to research and write on the same project (book) consistently for a long period of time given other responsibilities and projects. Books take a long time to write and to publish. I read somewhere that on average it takes about 7 years. This is much longer than a journal article or even any given research project, which usually goes for around 3-5 years in my experience.
Things also change over time, which can affect the project. For instance, the book started and, I think, finished, as being about post-election disputes in new democracies and non-democratic regimes. Therefore, the book was not about electoral compliance in advanced democracies. But, it just happened that in the last 7-10 years the topic of democratic backsliding in advanced democracies really got traction. And of course, the 2020 election in the United States (with all the questions about whether election outcomes would be accepted as well as the January 6th riots) all of a sudden made the questions I was asking relevant to advanced democracies as well. Therefore, the book had to adapt a bit to at least slightly address those questions as well.
In your book, you discuss how the question of whether election losers will comply or reject election outcomes is more and more pressing. Why might someone reject the outcome of an election?
I have two main findings here. First, political parties are more likely to reject election results using extra-legal means, such as staging post-election protests, when election-related rules have been changed prior to the election. Second, factors at the party level also matter. Political parties which are a part of the pre-electoral coalitions, socialist and nationalist parties, and parties that are not a part of the government before the election are more likely to reject election results.
What do you hope readers will take away from The Dilemma of Compliance?
I hope the readers will take away from the book three main points: (1) Actors. Many political science theories are about actors but many analyses are at the level of institutions. It is important to analyze actors. In the case of this book, political parties. It is the political parties that make the decision to either accept or reject election outcomes. (2) Strategies. When trying to understand post-election compliance and rejection it is important to think not only about why political parties refuse to comply with election results but also how they decide to do that. (3) Regime change. As we know, the majority of post-election disputes failed to deliver lasting regime change that scholars had hoped for. No, I do not argue that parties should quietly accept blatantly fraudulent elections. But it is important to consider that post-election disputes, mass protests in particular, may not be the best mode of transition to democracy.
