Challenging the Norm? International Election Accompaniment in Nicaragua and Venezuela

CHALLENGING THE NORM? INTERNATIONAL ELECTION ACCOMPANIMENT IN NICARAGUA AND VENEZUELA

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Shelley McConnell, St. Lawrence University

Jennifer McCoy, Georgia State University

Michael McCarthy, Johns Hopkins University SAIS

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Abstract

International election monitoring has been touted as a regional norm in the Western hemisphere, but recent reforms in Venezuela and Nicaragua substituted a diminished international role of electoral accompaniment. This article traces the initial acceptance and later limitation of international election monitoring in those countries to explore whether the change constitutes norm localization or norm defection. It concludes that the norm is not as well institutionalized in the hemisphere as conventionally thought, and that models need to assess together national and international monitoring capacities.

Keywords: Norm, election, observation, Nicaragua, Venezuela

Between 1990 and 2001, the emergence of a new international election monitoring norm (IEM) seemed to be accepted in the Western hemisphere.[1] The norm emerged as the practice of monitoring by international organizations to provide impartial third-party guarantees and confidence in situations of deep distrust, particularly those arising from transitions from authoritarian governments or from civil wars.[2] The concept included the expectation that those observerswould have unimpeded access to election authorities and all aspects of the process, and would report objectively on the process. The practice was extended by some states to continue to invite international observer missions beyond the transitional period simply to demonstrate their democratic credentials, and adopted by others when established democracies began to experience serious distrust or violence.

Recently, however, two countries where the IEMnorm appeared to be well established – Venezuela and Nicaragua – have departed from that framework, eschewing international monitoring of controversial elections and opting instead for international accompaniment. Nicaragua and Venezuela each invited comprehensive international election monitoring missions for successive elections (four national elections 1990-2006 for Nicaragua and six national elections 1998-2006 for Venezuela). Nonetheless, the electoral management bodies (EMBs) in Venezuela and Nicaragua implemented a major change after their 2006 national elections by limiting the role for international groups to a new role of electoral accompaniment.[3]Electionaccompaniment entails a more symbolic presence ofinternational witnesseswhose primary role is to lend gravitas to an important occasion but not judge election quality or voice criticism of election administration, and it is focused largely on election day proceedings. By contrast, electionmonitoring entails a comprehensive and systematic collection of informationthroughout the election cycle in which the goal is to assess electoral administration at every phase in order to encourage advance remedy of problems that could reduce the quality of the election, and ultimately to arrive at credible conclusions about the process as a whole and recommendations for the future, and make them public.

Progress toward institutionalization of international election observation as the norm in Latin America must be reassessed in light of these cases. Should the new regulations in Nicaragua and Venezuela be understood asdefection from and non-compliance with the international election monitoringnorm that is posited to be operative in the Western hemisphere? Or do they represent an example of norm localization in which sovereign pushback adapts the norm to a framework asserting nationalist identity or democratic maturity?

International Election Monitoring as a Norm

As part of the Esquipulas peace agreements signed by the Central American countries, the government of Nicaragua invited international observers to monitor its 1990 electoral process from start to finish without impediment. The Organization of American States (OAS), United Nations (UN), and The Carter Center collaborated in that extensive international election monitoring effort and helped assure that all parties found the conditions sufficient to participate despite Nicaragua’s extreme poverty and ongoing civil war. Through monitoring of electoral preparations and mediation between distrusting actors to resolve disputes throughout the process, international observer missionshelped the election process stayon track despite the end of the government’s unilateral ceasefire and tensions generated by the US invasion of Panama. In a vote that riveted the attention of the global media, opposition candidate Violeta Chamorro won an upset victory that was accepted by the governing Sandinista National Liberation Front party and hailed internationally as cementing Nicaragua’s transition to democracy (McConnell 2000).

A subsequent undertaking in Haiti would also yield positive results for democracy. Thus it was that the two least developed countries in the Western hemisphere, neither of which had been democratic before, would prove the value of international election monitoring as a means through which the community of democratic nations could build confidence and promote democratic principles and practices in sovereign countries. Soon other countriesbegan inviting international election observers, whose missions in and outside of Latin America refined the modern practice of long-term, comprehensive international election monitoring, developing a toolkit of best practices thatincluded systematic surveys of compliance with voting procedures and the use of statistical measures (so-called “quick counts”) to assist in verification of results.[4]International Election Monitoring (IEM) became more professional and widespread (McCoy, Garber, Pastor, 1991; Santa Cruz 2005; Hyde 2011; Kelley 2012).

From 1990 to 2006, in a sample of 1,759 elections in 157 independent states with populations greater than 250,000,nearly 80% of national elections were internationally observed (Hyde 2011: 8). Many countries in Latin Americaand the Caribbean were among them, and routinely invited the OAS and often others (European Union, Commonwealth, and NGOs such as The Carter Center, IFES, NDI, and IRI) to send observers to their presidential and legislative elections.

In the Western hemisphere, IEM developed alongside broader mechanisms for the collective defense and promotion of democracy. The 1948 OAS Charter already enshrined member states’ commitment to representative government, but prior to the 1980s it was honored in the breach. Through its Santiago Commitment and Resolution 1080, approved on June 5, 1991, the OAS made good on that commitment by calling for an institutional response in the event of a sudden interruption of the democratic order (interpreted in practice to mean overthrow of an elected government via a military coup or presidential closure of the legislature). Election monitoring was listed as an OAS tool in the 2001 Inter-American Democratic Charter (IADC),which required that member states hold periodic free and honest elections based on universal suffrage and a secret ballot. Elections that could not be verified as meeting that standard were potential grounds for expulsion from the OAS – the deepest possible sanction that the organization could impose. However, the IADC did not require election-monitoring in member-states and has not expelled any country for problematic elections.[5]The United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay have never invited international observers, an omission that generally has not proven problematic because neither their political parties nor other member states have raised serious concerns about the quality of their electoral processes, with the exception of the 2000 U.S. presidential election.[6] With these exceptions, the prevalence of the practice was such that in the Western hemisphere, at least, IEM began to be referenced as a norm (Kelley 2012; Santa Cruz 2005:199; Hyde 2011: 7).

Why did states, and particularly those in Latin America, begin inviting international election monitoring on a wide-spread scale, reformulating the concept of sovereignty by inviting international actors to intrude in the most sovereign of acts – the choosing of a polity’s leaders? Explanations vary from ideational approaches focused on the interaction between normative systemic structures and shifting interests and identities of states (Santa Cruz 2005, Kacowicz 2005, Shaw 2004), to economic utility-maximizing theories of incentives (Hyde 2011, Kelley 2012). Kacowicz (2005) and Shaw (2004) suggest that Latin America has made distinctive contributions to global norms of sovereignty, nonintervention, pacific settlement of disputes, human rights, democracy, and transparency (anti-corruption). Santa Cruz (2005), argues that international election observation originated and developed into a norm in the Western hemisphere because the “Western Hemisphere Idea” includedthe concepts of representative government and human rights in the claim to sovereign statehood.

In contrast, Kelley (2012) and Hyde (2011) highlight the incentives provided by powerful donor countries and multilateral banks that use political conditionality to reward and punish electoral behavior. Hyde argues that when states perceive they can increase their share of international benefits (e.g. foreign aid, investment, tourism, trade, membership in international organizations, legitimacy and prestige)they invite international observers in an effort to send an externally credible signal that the inviting state possesses desirable characteristicsthat include a commitment to the human right of competitive elections. These motives exist even for governments that intend to engage in some degree of fraud, so conforming to the norm means the government recognizesthe norm’s existence but does not necessarily imply acceptance of the norm as legitimate or government willingness to institutionalize the norm in electoral law and administration.

With the increased attention to election practices, in the 21st century those wishing to manipulate electoral outcomes were forced to replace crude fraud, such as ballot box stealing or stuffing, with more sophisticated attempts to manipulate elections by restricting the universe of candidates, affecting the franchise through voter lists, or creating vastly inequitable campaign conditions through corrupt private financing or abuse of state resources. Such governments calculate that the risk of being caught with these harder to detect and measure behaviors is low relative to the benefits of the legitimacy bestowed by an international presence during the elections (Hartlyn and McCoy, 2006; Kelley, 2012).

The adoption and dissemination of norms is a vast topic that has largely ignored the question of subsequent rejection of norms. Cortell and Davis (2005: 3-25) have shown that national values matter in international norm adoption, and a specific norm may be less likely to be adopted where there is no cultural affinity for it. Amitav Acharya (2009) emphasizes the reciprocal nature of norm adoption. In his notion of “norm localization” international actors purvey norms in local contexts and local agents reshape those international norms in the process of adopting them. Thus, Acharya employs “norm localization” to describe how local actors reconstruct foreign ideas through discourse, reframing, grafting and cultural selection. That is, norms evolve in the process of being accepted, and come to reflect local content. We are interested in the extension of these issues: At what point does localization of a norm alter it so much that the norm loses function, no longer matching the international pattern that was its genesis or constraining state behavior in the expected direction? When can we say that the norm has been changed to the point of being suborned?

Nicaragua

In 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrew Latin America’s longest-running dicatorship and set about making a transition to socialism. It thus came as a surprise to many that in 1983 Nicaragua generated a legal framework that permitted pluralist competition for control of the government, and held partially competitive elections in 1984, predictably won by the FSLN and its leader Daniel Ortega. The United States refused to recognize the results, instead deepening its support for the paramilitary Contras bent on overthrowing the Sandinista government by force of arms.Six years later, the FSLN accepted its electoral loss and ceded control of the state, under the watchful eyes of the extensive international monitoring effort described above.

International observers were credited with helping bring about the transition to democracy, and their role was made permanent in Nicaraguan electoral law. Subsequent national elections in 1996, 2001 and 2006 were also observed, and the practice was not only accepted but much anticipated. In this sense, international election observation might be considered constitutive for Nicaraguan democracyetched into the very definition of democratic politics, whereas elsewhere it was a regulatory norm (Searle 1995).

The 1996 and 2001 national elections were won by Liberals while the FSLN remained in second place with roughly 40 percent of the vote, and Daniel Ortega retained leadership of the party. His patience paid off in 2006 when the Liberals split and Ortega won the presidency with a plurality. Soon thereafter, unable to achieve a constitutional reform allowing a third term, Ortega appealed to the Supreme Court. In a process fraught with problems the Court decided in 2009 that the constitutional prohibition against immediate re-election and the two-term limit could not be applied to Ortega, making him eligible for re-election in 2011 and in perpetuity.

Fully three-quarters of the Nicaraguan public favored international observation of the 2011 elections (Cinco 2011).FSLN leaders, however,had harbored doubts about election observation ever since their traumatic loss in 1990, and the failure of observers to give credence to FSLN allegations of fraud in the 1996 elections. At a July 2006 anniversary celebration of the Sandinista revolution, Ortega recalled that election, saying it had been “scandalously fraudulent, irregular, corrupt and we denounced it, but our denunciation came to nothing because it was not echoed by the observers”(Pantoja 2006).

Two months later, in September of 2006, Ortega implied observers planned to delegitimize the upcoming November elections to thwart his expected victory. “With all due respect that many members of the OAS and Carter Center observation missions deserve, we have said that we do not believe in observers, we believe in political party pollwatchers to defend the vote,” Ortega said. He continued, “There are observers who are totally interventionist, disrespectful and that exist simply to facilitate or create conditions so that the candidates of capital, of neoliberalism will win and avoid a victory by a force like the Sandinista Front” (El Nuevo Diario 2006).

The FSLN presidential victory inNovember 2006, together with the party’s dominance of the electoral branch, created an opportunity to translate such anti-observation sentiments into policy. Resistance to observation began in earnest with the 2008 municipal elections, to which the government declined to invite established international observers or accredit credible domestic observer groups. Opposition charges of widespread acts of fraud marred those elections, and in their wake European and US donor countries conditioned aid on improvements in the electoral process.

Instead the Nicaraguan government began to institutionalize new terms for election observation. The election observationregulations for the Atlantic Coast regional elections held in March 2010 were significantly more restrictive than past rules, and in 2011, the CSE began to use the term “accompaniment” in place of “observation”. President Ortega linked election monitoring to historical US interventionism. “If they want to accompany us they should do so, but we don’t want controllers,” Ortega said in his state of the union speech in January 2011 (La Nación 2013). He went on to recall the 1928 elections, supervised by occupying US Marines and seen by some scholars as the cleanest Nicaragua held in that period. “We are grown up now. We aren’t going to allow a repetition of the history of the elections when Nicaragua was invaded and when Yankee troops came to organize the electoral authorities.” Addressing the plenary session of the Sao Paulo Forum four months later, Ortega stated even more clearly that he associated international election observation with foreign intervention. “Here in this region and in particular in Nicaragua, the Europeans, the Americans, intercede and they do it through their representatives, among whom in Nicaragua you have to list the interventionist forces of election observers,” (Baca, 2011).

Whereas in past elections observation groups had received clear invitations eight to ten months in advance of the vote, and set up their offices in Managua three to five months in advance, for the November 2011 national electionsthe Supreme Electoral Council delayed publication of the regulations for election observation until August 16 of 2011, by which time registration of parties, candidates and voters, as well as verification of polling site assignments, was already concluded. The new regulations radically altered the terms of engagement in ways that substantially reduced the capacity of observers to mount an effective monitoring mission for the remaining election preparations. Moreover, key elements were internally contradictory, leaving substantial ambiguity in the text. The partisan nature of the election authorities created concern that those gray areas would be interpreted in the most restrictive fashion possible.

Some elements of the 2011 regulations appeared to restrict election observers in ways that contradicted the spirit and sometimes the letter of the Declaration of Principles for International Election Observers, announced at the United Nations in 2005 after extensive collaborative drafting by all the major international election observation agencies, including the OAS, EU and The Carter Center. As noted in a public statement by The Carter Center in September 2011, these contradictions included: The Supreme Electoral Council would determine the number of delegates that organizations could bring, a calendar on which accompaniment activities could be implemented;and the routes along which both domestic and international observers could travel. International accompaniment organizations would be required to provide a draft copy of any final report to the Foreign Ministry, and reach consensus with the election authorities concerning its publication.

The tone and content of the regulations produced consternation among international observers as they sought to determine whether and how they could credibly monitor the elections under such conditions, but the FSLN government very much wanted at least some of them to do so. Three days after the regulations emerged, the Nicaraguan government addressed the concerns that had been voiced publicly by The Carter Center and behind closed doors by other international observer groups, and sought to persuade observers to come, though without changing the stated terms and in oratory that was none too reassuring. In a nationally televised speech opening the election campaign, President Ortega said, “Here we are not going to expel anyone for coming to scream and shout four or five times, for coming to slander,” and that it was Nicaraguans who would practice oversight on the elections, though observers “can say what they want.” He specifically addressed The Carter Center, saying it “could come here as it has always done, without limitations.” (Martínes, 2013).