Explaining Internationally Monitored Elections: Foreign Democracy Promotion, Norm Development and the Domestic Consequences of International Intervention.

International actors play a prominent role promoting democratization throughout the world. However, social scientists have not yet thoroughly explained why sovereign nations accept these intrusions into their domestic political processes, and what the consequences of various forms of external ?assistance? may be. This paper explores the causes of one increasingly popular method of promoting democratization: international monitoring of elections. I argue that international election monitoring first occurred because it allowed leaders of countries truly committed to democratization to signal their type to international and domestic audiences. By distinguishing themselves from ?pseudo-democrats?, they were able to gain additional benefits in terms of legitimacy and additional economic assistance from Western nations. In order to continue to be viewed as a leader of a democratizing country, pseudo-democrats also invited monitors to their elections, even when they risked the documentation and exposure of non-democratic practices. Western democracies and intergovernmental organizations funded and supplied monitors because of their two pronged goal of supporting the spread of democracy and gaining additional information about less transparent political regimes. These incentives eventually led to an international norm under which all leaders of democratizing countries invite international monitors to their elections. As more pseudo-democrats attempted to mimic the signal of inviting monitors, the strength of the signal decreased, and international democracy promoters and ?true democrats? found ways to make inviting more costly for pseudo-democrats. This produced increases in the sophistication of monitoring methods, the number of monitors, and the duration of the monitoring missions. The trend is documented and the explanation is tested with an original dataset of all elections from 1970-2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]