New evidence gathered by the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP) has just been released in an annual report, The Year in Elections 2014, and the third release of the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI_3) dataset, available from Dataverse.

The project compares the risks of flawed and failed national elections, and how far countries around the world meet international standards. The EIP is an independent research project based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University, under the direction of Professor Pippa Norris. The Program Manager for the PEI survey is Ferran Martinez i Coma, with research assistance from Max Grömping.

The dataset is based on a rolling expert survey which now measures the integrity of 127 national parliamentary and presidential contests held from 1 July 2012 to 31 December 2014 in 107 countries worldwide. The third release covers almost two-thirds of all independent nation states holding direct elections for the presidency or lower house of the national legislature, and more countries will be included as elections are held in subsequent years, such as in Britain, Canada and Nigeria during 2015.

The evidence is derived from a global survey of 1,429 election experts. Immediately after each contest, the survey asks domestic and international experts to monitor the quality based on 49 indicators. These responses are then clustered into eleven stages occurring during the electoral cycle and summed to construct an overall 100-point expert Perception of Electoral Integrity (PEI) index and ranking.