The Rise and Fall of Election Observation

10th session of CEFRES in-house seminar
Through the presentation of works in progress, CEFRES’s Seminar aims at raising and discussing issues about methods, approaches or concepts, in a multidisciplinary spirit, allowing everyone to confront her or his own perspectives with the research presented.

Location: CEFRES Library and online (to get the link, write to cefres[@]cefres.cz)
Date: Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 16:30
Language: English

Speaker: Markus POLLAK (CEFRES/CEU)
Discussant: TBC

Abstract

In recent years, democracy promotion and liberal international ordering have faced increasing challenges, which have had both reformative and disruptive effects. International election observation, one of the most important practices linking domestic liberal-democratic ideas and international politics, is particularly affected by struggles over electoral truth. Building on a Bourdieu-inspired practice approach, I analyze how international election observation, a weak transnational field, is shaped by doxic reproduction, orthodox reform, and heterodox disruption. Drawing on 31 interviews with election observers, my own experience as an EU and OSCE observer (2022–2025), and archival research at the OSCE Documentation Centre in Prague, I trace the evolution of election observation practices and demonstrate how the field is under increasing pressure and faces an emerging existential threat. Election observation evolved from an ad-hoc, improvised political-symbolic practice designed to welcome new democracies in the 1990s to an increasingly professionalized technical-diplomatic and universalized practice in the 2000s. In the 2010s, election observation struggled to fight off disruptive forms of practices, such as parallel “shadow election observation,” and reduced access to target countries. Most recently, disruptive endogenous practices, such as the large-scale defunding of US election observation activities, have almost led to the demise of the American subfield and have challenged key election observation institutions like the OSCE. Demonstrating the impact of heterodox disruption on the micro-practice of election observation provides a case study of the broader subversion of liberal ordering and shows how transnational practices affect democratic backsliding.

Please find the complete program of 2025–2026 seminar here.