There’s a paper out in the current issue of Perspectives on Politics, “The More the Merrier? The Effects of Having Multiple International Election Monitoring Organizations”, by Judith Kelley. Her paper has some really useful data on the number of elections, over time, with multiple international election monitoring organizations present. She also discusses the costs and benefits of having multiple international election monitoring organizations present to study an election in a particular nation, and she devotes a lot of time to an interesting discussion of how contradictory results from different monitoring organizations can be used politically by nations. Finally, she argues that “The ability of governments to manipulate the election monitoring experience increases as the number of organizations available for monitoring grows.” I found it an engaging and interesting read.