The effects of electoral bodies autonomy in the elections cleanliness: The Latin America case.

Abstract.Democratic systems have regular elections, which supposes the existence of one or moreorganisms in each nation in charge of organizing the elections. Electoral governance is supposedto have an impact on the quality of the processes and democracy itself. Formally, the integrationand composition of the electoral bodies generate differences due to the number of managementbodies, the duration of their mandates, the way in which their members are selected, their levelof professionalization and links with parties and the government, their condition of autonomyand financial sufficiency, their capacity for legislative initiative and the level of involvement ofthe political parties in their decisions for the organization of the elections.In practice, it is essential to review and verify the effective existence, meaning andmagnitude of the impact of electoral bodies and their autonomy regarding issues related to thequality of processes and democracy in Latin American nations.For this, it is necessary to resort to one of the most complete sources of information toconceptualize and measure democracy in the countries of the world through the compilation ofa multidimensional and disaggregated set of data that aims to reflect the complexity of thephenomenon: the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, which provides indices ondemocracy and electoral cleanliness and indicators on the autonomy and sufficiency of electoralbodies by country and year, which can be crossed with indicators for each election on electoralparticipation, vote buying and other irregularities, government intimidation and other forms ofviolence, as well as acceptance of defeat, in addition to an estimator of cleanliness and perceivedfreedom in each process.The exploitation of these data and the analysis of the relationship between the indicatorsby election and the annual estimators for the region will be the task that we will address in thispaper.