Domestic Monitors
This chapter analyzes the roles of domestic election observers who are monitoring contests in countries around the world where elections have been commonly undermined by malpractices such as clientelism, fraud, intimidation, and vote buying. It predicts that the formation and maintenance of domestic election watchdog groups depends primarily on a combination of grievances (incidents of serious electoral malpractice) and political opportunities (the freedom of civil society groups to mobilize around such issues). Moreover, these factors are theorized to interact. As a result, domestic monitors are expected to be strongest in hybrid regimes that are neither established democracies nor electoral autocracies, displaying an inverted U-shape pattern across levels of democratization. The chapter presents evidence supporting this proposition by drawing from a new data set documenting the global distribution of domestic monitoring groups.