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Intra-Party Electoral Integrity in Times of Hybrid Politics

Cyber Politics
Elections
Political Parties
Rule of Law
F. Ramón Villaplana
University of Valencia
F. Ramón Villaplana
University of Valencia

Abstract

One of the major issues affecting the quality of democracy is electoral integrity. Electoral integrity is often contrasted with electoral malpractices, which are understood as violations of the rules that make up electoral integrity, as fraudulent practices during the campaign and the polling day or the manipulation of the results. Both concepts have led to comparable indexes by contrasting broad sets of empirical indicators. Political parties, as main actors competing in elections, have a key role in the performance and the perception of the electoral integrity of elections, so deeper research on their internal electoral practices is advisable, being the intra-party processes the stage which precedes elections, like party primaries and candidates’ selection. The lack of electoral integrity and the presence of malpractices in intra-party democratic processes have already been identified as a frequent problem and have led to numerous scandals, which are detrimental to the credibility and legitimacy of the political system as a whole. Many of these malpractices are related to endemic clientelistic systems in developing countries but others are associated with the recent and growing digitalization of a good number of political parties, so both types of processes –in person and online– must be considered. Also, many European political parties have shown being far away of performing high levels of transparency or having anticorruption commitment. The concept of intra-party electoral integrity emerges from the field of Political Science but is also close and considers the fields of Law, Sociology, Criminology and Economy, as regulation, political behaviour, felonies and finances are considered as part of itself, so an interdisciplinary approach will be applied. There is an important gap not only in the literature but also in the practical exercise that clearly should be covered. Even intra-party democracy is often regarded, there are not theoretical neither procedural common standards for a well performed intra-party participation when the time to vote comes. The paper aims to set standards and guiding principles whose compliance would guarantee the neutrality and proper functioning of the entire electoral cycle corresponding to any internal party process. For that, we will build up a theoretical frame which lies both on the literature of electoral integrity and the one on intra-party democracy.