Guardians of trust: foreign election interference and the institutional logics of democratic resilience among Swedish county governors

Democratic resilience has emerged as a central theme in academic debates in response to growing threats to contemporary democracies, yet little attention has been paid to resilience capacity to external stressors. This article conceptualises electoral integrity as a key democratic resilience capacity and examines how central actors in the Swedish electoral administration make sense of, and navigate, foreign election interference. Drawing on institutional logics theory and qualitative interviews with Swedish county governors, the article demonstrates how governors approach resilience through a logic of trust: interviewees view trust as both a core democratic resource and a target of foreign adversaries. Assuming the role of guardians of trust, governors rely on institutional practices of transparency, impartiality, and standardization as central tools. By positioning foreign election interference as a key external stressor and electoral integrity as a resilience capacity, the article contributes to the growing literature on democratic resilience. By providing insight into the work of the electoral administration, it also adds a novel resilience perspective to security studies scholarship on foreign interference. Finally, the article indicates a need for future comparative studies on electoral integrity as a resilience capacity in the context of external stressors across settings with diverging levels of trust.