The Rise and Fall of International Election Observation: The Slow and Quick Deaths of OSCE monitoring

In recent years, democracy promotion and international norms of electoral integrity 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 contestation. Drawing on a Bourdieu-inspired practice approach, I analyse how international election observation, a weak transnational field, is contested both endogenously and exogenously. Drawing on 26 interviews with election observers, my own experience as an EU and OSCE observer (2022–2025), archival research at the OSCE Documentation Centre in Prague and fieldwork in Atlanta (Carter Center) and Washington, D.C. (OAS, NDI and IRI), 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 political-symbolic practice designed to welcome new democracies in the 1990s to an increasingly professionalized technical-diplomatic practice in the 2000s. In the 2010s, election observation struggled to fight off disruptive forms of contestation, such as parallel "shadow election observation," and reduced access to target countries. Strategic communication practices through authoritarian-backed media pluralize claims to electoral truth, making international condemnation less effective. In parallel to emerging domestic challenges to electoral integrity, disruptive endogenous practices, such as the large-scale defunding of US election observation activities, have almost led to the demise of the American subfield. Demonstrating the impact of contestation 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 and electoral integrity.