When Elections Become Crises: Crisis Management, Institutional Architecture, and Democratic Resilience in the United States and France
Democratic elections are increasingly contested sites for informational attacks, delegitimization, and legitimacy strain. Yet the frameworks most commonly applied to electoral vulnerability, electoral integrity and democratic backsliding, were not designed to examine the moment of acute institutional pressure when governing bodies must recognize, respond to, and communicate about an active crisis in real time. This thesis applies crisis management theory to the electoral process, arguing that it provides analytical tools these frameworks do not supply. Drawing on Boin et al.’s (2017) crisis governance framework, this thesis develops a threshold-based analytical model grounded in three core parameters: threat, uncertainty, and urgency. They will be applied to assess when democratic elections cross the threshold from routine contestation into crisis events. Once that threshold is crossed, institutional responses are evaluated across five crisis governance tasks: sensemaking, decision-making, meaning-making, accounting, and post-crisis learning. The framework is applied through a comparative case study of four presidential elections across two consolidated democracies: the 2016 and 2020 elections in the United States and the 2017 and 2022 elections in France. Both countries faced comparable external disinformation threats yet produced markedly different institutional responses. The United States, operating through a decentralized electoral governance architecture, failed to recognize the 2016 election interference operation in real time, and the unresolved legitimacy strain of that cycle compounded into the 2020 election cycle, culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capital. France, operating through a centralized architecture with legally grounded regulatory frameworks, contained the 2017 MacronLeaks operation before it crossed the crisis threshold and institutionalized that learning before the 2022 election. The comparative analysis finds that institutional architecture shapes not only crisis management capacity but the durability of post-crisis learning. Both systems share a structural vulnerability that existing frameworks were not designed to address. The thesis concludes that crisis management capacity in the electoral domain is not a feature that democratic institutions possess by default. It is a capacity that must be deliberately built, legally protected, and institutionally sustained.
Áfallastjórnun, Kosningar, Bandaríkin, Frakkland
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