Abstract
Dov H. Levin has written a tremendously timely book about a surprisingly understudied topic: partisan electoral interventions. Levin explores how and why the two Cold War superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia, intervened on behalf of candidates and parties around the world between 1946 and 2000.
Various forms of foreign electoral interventions have existed since at least Papal elections in the early modern period. Fear of foreign interference pushed the Founding Fathers of the US to create the Electoral College, as Alexander Hamilton outlined in “Federalist No. 68.” Yet, foreign interference did not end with mass democratization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Levin provides a welcome scholarly counterpoint to the breathless commentary since 2016 on this topic, showing that “the new-found prominence of such meddling in the aftermath of the 2016 US election has been largely due to the sudden detection by many of a common phenomenon of international politics rather than the emergence of something new or unprecedented” (244).
Contrary to prior scholarship’s focus on military interventions, weapons supplies, and foreign-imposed regime changes (FIRCs), Levin highlights the frequency and adaptability of electoral interference. He finds that 11.3 per cent of all national-level executive elections between 1946 and 2000 involved some form of electoral interference (i.e., 117 of 937 elections). The US conducted 69 per cent of those interventions, meaning 81, while it undertook 53 FIRCs during the Cold War. Partisan electoral interference was and remained a commonplace tool.
Levin defines a partisan electoral intervention as “a situation in which one or more sovereign countries intentionally undertake specific actions to influence an upcoming election in another sovereign country in an overt or covert manner that they believe will favour or hurt one of the sides contesting that election and will incur, or may incur, significant costs to the intervener(s) or the intervened country” (50). Such interventions can take myriad forms, including campaign financing, providing campaign experts as assistance, disseminating disinformation, public promises, or admonishments. Campaign financing was most common, forming two-thirds of all electoral interventions.
Levin seeks to understand the causes and the effects of partisan electoral interference. He uses a multimethod approach by constructing an original data set, using election surveys for two cases, in 1953 West Germany and 1992 Israel, and delving into six case studies based on archival research around the US. Three main findings stood out to me as particularly novel and important.
First, the work shows that electoral interventions are “usually ‘inside jobs’” (6), unlike other types of foreign intervention. They occur both because a superpower sees potential damage to its interests and because a domestic candidate or party invites intervention. I appreciated that Levin also supported this finding through three case studies where intervention did not occur, as one of these two conditions was missing: Greece in 1967, Venezuela in 1958, and the Philippines in 1965.
Second, Levin finds that overt electoral interventions are generally more successful than covert ones. Of the electoral interventions in Levin’s data set, 35.9 per cent were overt, marking a significant portion of interventions. This suggests the importance of moving beyond strictly delineating domestic and foreign politics. Foreign leaders’ open behaviour can and does affect domestic politics.
Third, consolidated democracies (like the United Kingdom in 1987) were just as likely to be targeted with electoral interventions as more fragile democracies. In fact, Levin finds that electoral interventions are actively harmful for candidates in founding elections (i.e., the first election for a democracy), whereas they help in other instances.
The book did raise some questions, though, about case study selection and interpretation, as well as Levin’s definition of sovereignty. In many ways, the book’s key case study is West Germany in 1953, which features in chapters 3 and 7. Yet, how sovereign was West Germany, really, in 1953? It was still under military occupation by the Allied High Commission. The 1953 election happened under the shadow of revisions to the Bonn–Paris conventions that would eventually end Allied occupation of West Germany in May 1955. Only then could West Germany join NATO under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s leadership. Only in 1973 did the two Germanies join the United Nations, but only with the Two Plus Four Agreement in 1990 did the four Allies fully relinquish all claims. In 1953, the US was less a foreign power than an occupying power. Definitionally, sovereignty is less a light switch than a dial, less an actual state than a contested category. Future scholarship might consider how to incorporate these complexities.
Another question arose from a potential mismatch between the historical case studies and the analysis of the 2016 election. All of Levin’s case studies examine the US, yet chapter 8 examines Russian interference in the US. Levin’s data set indicates that Russian interventions did differ from the US in one respect—they did not provide campaign assistance. Might case studies have revealed other differences in process and decision-making? Here, the difficulty of archival access to such Russian or Soviet sources is clear, but it would be important to acknowledge potential differences—beyond geography and types of aid—between how and why the US and the Soviet Union/Russia intervened.
A final question arose from the list of cases in the appendix. The omission of several Canadian examples makes me wonder whether other instances have been missed that might have further strengthened Levin’s case and also ensured a more robust data set. While Levin lists an overt Soviet attempt to help the Liberal Party in Canada in 1962, he does not list the Kennedy administration’s (in)famous attempts to influence the 1962 and 1963 elections. Alongside leaking information and issuing public threats, Kennedy’s top pollster, Lou Harris, provided substantial campaign assistance to Lester Pearson. All this meets, in Levin’s model, the threshold of multiple criteria for electoral interventions.
Such questions show the importance of further research on this crucial topic, particularly as the history also shows quite clearly that electoral interventions are here to stay. The book ends with important reflections on future developments. Because two-thirds of electoral interventions involve campaign funding, cryptocurrencies seem an important future source of potential problems. Levin recommends forbidding campaign donations via cryptocurrencies to prevent this problem alongside banning all elected officials, their families, political parties, and candidates from owning and purchasing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
Overall, Levin has written a deeply researched and thought-provoking book on partisan electoral interventions with important implications for scholars and policy-makers alike.