article
Arquitectura institucional, contexto sociocultural e integridad electoral
Fecha
2016Autor
Nohlen, Dieter
Institución
Resumen
I am going to speak on institutional architecture, sociocultural context and electoral integrity, and precisely, on the complex interrelation of the three phenomena. I will deal with the issue of institutional architecture and electoral integrity at a somewhat abstract level, which in the title of this first session of the Second Congress of the AWEB is placed in a close and specific relationship - “the electoral institutionality necessary to guarantee electoral integrity ”. I am not going to refer to or comment on the electoral practice and justice manuals that have appeared in the last decade and that report on international standards of electoral institutionality, reference manuals, addressed to electoral bodies and electoral observers, since they contain valuable instructions on how to organize free and honest elections and how to evaluate their democratic quality.1 I will present rather conceptual considerations, in line with what Max Weber emphasized, that without concepts no knowledge is obtained and “not the 'factual' connections between 'things' but the conceptual connections between problems are at the base of the work of science ”(2001, p. 57). I will sometimes take as a point of reference the Electoral Integrity Project by Pippa Norris et al., 2 one of the most ambitious projects in the social sciences to measure electoral integrity worldwide. I will include in my considerations the sociocultural context in which elections are held. The context constitutes the historical framework to reflect on the institutions, their functions and their real effects. I am going to refer to the Latin American context, sometimes counteracting it with that of other regions of the world, based on my own research and my experiences as a participant observer.