Monitoring elections in post-Soviet States: diverse paths and similar strategies of pro-democratic movements

This study is devoted to the in-depth investigation and comparison of election monitoring organisations in post-Soviet states. Election observation has become one of the core activities of civil society throughout the world, while in the post-Soviet region it became an indispensable part of the political process since the early 1990s. Particularly relevance for this task appears to be found in hybrid regimes: on the one hand, there exist grievances related to the quality of elections; on the other hand, political context is more open than in autocracies, allowing for certain activities of civil society. Relying on the versatile social movement and civil society scholarship, this project investigates monitoring organisations in three states that are often labelled hybrid regimes, namely Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Careful investigation of election monitoring organizations suggests that they predominantly rely on transactional activism, emphasising cooperation with different actors rather than contention. In turn, very little is known about how this type of activism develops in the post-Soviet region, which resources and strategies it encompasses and how different contextual factors lead to the devel- opment of transactional activism. Hence, the project contributes to the development of the transactional activism concept by presenting evidence from new case studies. In so doing it focuses on the different paths that the most visible political NGOs take in adopting transactional activism. The study attempts to explain how similar modes of activism developed and which factors or combination of factors have led to the adop- tion of certain strategies. This careful investigation shows how transactional activism is shaped in three countries by the number of external and internal factors, particu- larly, by the political contexts and resources. Furthermore, the interactional approach adopted in this study considers outcomes of the election monitoring as conditions for the further development of the monitoring organisations. This project relies on the activists’ own understanding of these contextual factors and limitations in resource; it voices activists’ views on strategies and discusses their motivations behind certain strategic choices. Methodologically, the study predominantly relies on a qualitative research design in which three case studies are complemented by the comparative investigation. The project draws its conclusions from a variety of data sources and presents rich empirical evidence on the internal development of organisations that have not yet been investigated. The study concludes that, while internal features of election monitoring NGOs closely resemble each other, differences in external political context account for the diverse paths of transactional activism development. In general, this project contributes to a further expansion of our knowledge of post-Soviet civil society.