The Importance of a Liberal Power’s Attention to Democratic Elections Around the World

We build on the concept of attention costs in international affairs: When the agenda of powerful states is crowded, other states can get away with behavior the powerful state would otherwise sanction. Our example focuses on the United States as a liberal power promoting democratic elections. We use a game to demonstrate that greater attention costs by the “supervising” liberal power result in more cheating by foreign incumbents. We utilize the US domestic election cycle to predict variation in attention costs. Because they need to focus on reelection, American policymakers have less effort to devote to other policy objectives. We show that this is the case with a novel measure of attention to elections abroad. Finally, we construct an index of bias to show that presidential elections in the US are associated with more biased elections abroad. We conclude by noting that international pressure may keep cheating incumbents in check.