Armen Mazmanyan

This research will provide a definition of legalism as electoral fraud and will describe most common patterns of “political legalism” in the electoral context. Based on my earlier research efforts on legalism in the context of constitutional politics in post-Soviet hybrid regimes, this work will try to expand the geography of the study by taking other non-democratic countries on board of research and will try to extend the reach of this research to the world's other regions (South Asia, MENA, etc). It will also study the relevance of the proposed patterns for countries somewhat retreating from democratic practices in the last years (Poland, Hungary). The research will eventually come up with a comprehensive comparative account of political legalism as electoral fraud, its consequences and implications for policy and reform, both domestic and international.