election-watch.eu

Vienna, 10 July 2025: This year’s Electoral Integrity Conference featured a panel on ‘Monitoring Electoral Integrity’. Election-Watch.EU researcher Markus Pollak contributed two papers to the conference, which were presented in the panel.

In collaboration with Clément Desrumaux, one of Markus Pollak’s research project examines the recruitment practices of OSCE election observers. Their draft paper, „It’s a Small World! For 20 years, it’s often the same people!’. National Policing and Differentiated Transnationalization in the Field of OSCE Election Observation”, argues that the current OSCE observer recruitment system leads to asymmetric professionalization, differentiated transnationalization of the field and various forms of national gatekeeping, which impact the composition of missions.

The second conference paper, ‘When Observers Become Targets: Russian Subversive Contestation within the OSCE’, co-authored with Liliia Sablina and Mehmet Yavuz, reconstructs the trajectory of Russian contestation of the OSCE’s human dimension, particularly regarding election observation. By examining Russian government discourse and historical data, the paper demonstrates that Russian contestation of OSCE election observation has oscillated between reformative and subversive periods, intensifying in recent years.

You can find the presentations on YouTube via the following link.

accountability, election obdservation, electoral integrity, transparency