Abstract

Over the last few years, the European Commission has put forward a package of measures to ensure free and fair elections, to establish a code of conduct for political parties’ campaigning and to strengthen the right of European citizens to vote at local, national and European level. These measures reflect a new concern with what is called integrity of elections. In this article, we reconstruct the complex and multi-level Eu approach to «secure democratic elections». As we will argue, the reference to election integrity has allowed the Commission to broaden its agenda from measures initially limited to ensuring voter turnout in European elections to a comprehensive regulatory framework for electoral campaigns, including a code of conduct for political parties, media and content regulation. Such an approach to electoral integrity is in line with recent attempts to make the democratic quality of elections measurable through complex indexes and the development of indicators of democratic performance. We show how electoral integrity is no longer limited to electoral rules and procedures, but also encompasses the control of the conditions that enable citizens to participate in free and fair elections. Under this latter aspect, the Commission has taken measures to ensure access to evidence-based information and to protect the rights of social media users, with far-reaching implications for promoting political participation beyond the electoral context. Such an expanded electoral integrity policy agenda targets not only national authorities and political parties, but also civil society at large and individual voters, whose rights to political participation are strengthened in relation to their rights to freedom of expression and information. In this sense, the Eu approach to election integrity is best understood as a promotion of citizenship, not only protecting existing standards in the form of monitoring free elections, but actively advancing the rights of European citizens