In the last years, questions dealing with the causes and consequences of fraudulent elections have won popularity among political scientists. However, there has been little attention in exploring why a country would allow a third-party to monitor the elections and, likewise, why an international institution – or NGO – would be interested in deploying a mission to observe such election. In this paper, I argue that electoral observation missions (EOMs) are observed when a particular set of conditions are met: in developing countries that need to enhance trade partnerships and increase foreign aid; in democracies with stronger opposition forces, and in young economically dependent regimes. These hypotheses are tested using a novel dataset and using a selection-model that takes into account the partial visibility of the data.
