What is an important consequence of partisan elections of members of the state board of education?

Although quite recent, the Russian intervention in the 2016 U.S. elections for candidate Donald Trump has already earned the dubious distinction of being one of the most well-known acts of foreign interference of the modern era. More than 36 million English language pages on the internet now refer to it in some manner.1 Much of this discussion focused on the reasons for Russia’s conduct, the possible collusion of the Trump campaign with the Russian government, and fears of future meddling of this kind in the United States and elsewhere. There has been far less discussion about the wider phenomena of which this particular intervention is just one recent example of the effects such meddling may have on its target state.

Until recently, the public conversation reflected the status of the academic literature as well. International relations, the natural home of research on this kind of cross-border phenomena in political science, has ignored it. The scant reference to such meddling in this literature usually served as a short prelude to discussions of other kinds of interventions.2 The other social sciences have followed a similar pattern. Diplomatic historians occasionally noted such meddling as part of a larger study of a certain era or a dyadic relationship and tried to assess its impact in that specific case.3 Likewise, scholars in intelligence studies discussed a few cases of such interventions as part of a larger qualitative study of such operations by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.4 Neither discipline has tried, however, to assess the impact of such interference in a systemic manner. Nor has there been an attempt to provide a “big picture” overview of the main methods, history, or overall trends of this specific form of meddling. Beginning a few years before the 2016 elections, and growing rapidly afterward, I and several other scholars have begun to do exactly this sort of work. Our efforts now make it possible, for the first time, to provide an overview of the known systemic effects of foreign electoral meddling as well as its overall record. That, in turn, enables us to provide a preliminary scholarly answer to the question in the title.

As will be seen in the following sections, the literature thus far on this topic indicates that such interventions are a long-standing and common phenomenon that in many situations can determine the affected election results and cause significant harm to their targets. Accordingly, concerns by democratic states about the possibility of such meddling in their elections are fully justified.

This chapter proceeds as follows. Section II reviews the main methods through which foreign powers are known to have tried to intervene in elections in other states in order to determine their results. Section III describes the history of such interference. Section IV surveys what is known so far from research on this topic about the various short- and medium-term effects of such interference on the target state. Finally, I conclude by explaining why the use of digital tools in order to conduct foreign partisan electoral interventions is unlikely, given the ways they have been used thus far, to lead to major changes in their overall negative effects and provide some guidelines for dealing with this phenomenon.

One common definition of “election interference” in the literature is a situation in which one or more sovereign states intentionally undertakes specific actions to influence an upcoming election5 in another sovereign state in an overt or covert manner that they believe will favor or hurt one of the sides contesting that election and which incurs, or may incur, significant costs to the intervening state or the intervened state.6

This definition does not include acts done by private citizens of a certain state on their own volition, such as campaign consultants hired for pay by a candidate or party in another state to give it campaigning advice, and so forth. Likewise, interventions by nonstate actors (transnational terrorist groups, nongovernmental organizations, international organizations, global media conglomerates, etc.) are not included unless they are directly controlled by an intervening state (via funding, etc.) or clear evidence exists that their intervention was done at the request of, or due to the pressures from, such an intervening state. The definition does include an element of intentionality to ensure that these acts result from the free will of the intervening state rather than due to outright coercion by the assisted side in the target state (say, threats to revoke an alliance treaty, or to restrict oil sales, or even to cut off foreign aid if the foreign power doesn’t intervene on its behalf).

In terms of the referenced costs to the intervening state, these can be direct economic or reputational harms. They can also be derivative of the potential damage to the relationship between the intervening state and the target state that, in turn, may lead the target state to harm the intervening state in various ways (impose sanctions, withdraw from an alliance treaty, make it harder for the intervening state to use its bases in the target state, reduce its cooperation in regards to terrorism, etc.). Naturally, any immediate costs experienced by the target state as a result of the intervention may lead the targeted leader or a significant share of the target’s public to want to downgrade relations with the intervening state. As a result, any costs imposed on the target state as part of such meddling, especially if the intervention fails or the “undesired” side wins a subsequent election, could be costly to the intervening state as well.

Intervening states have used a wide variety of methods both secret (covert7) and public (overt) to affect another state’s election in the desired manner. These methods are usually carefully tailored to the circumstances of the intervened elections or the needs of the side being assisted. Nevertheless, most known methods of electoral intervention can be grouped under six main categories:

 Campaign Funding: Providing campaign funding to the favored side. Such funding has been known to be given directly. This, for example, can involve the provision of cash, in-kind material aid (office equipment, newsprint for party newspaper or leaflets, vehicles for the party’s campaign, etc.), or via a “padded” contract with a firm affiliated with that party. It has also sometimes been given indirectly (e.g., via “independent” organizations bringing likely voters of the preferred side to and from the polls on election day).

 Dirty Tricks: Interventions using this method include acts that are designed to directly harm one or more candidates or parties competing against the preferred candidate or party. Examples of such acts have included: the dissemination of scandalous exposes or disinformation on the rival candidate or parties, physically harming or disabling rival candidates, damaging or destroying a rival’s offices or campaigning materials, breaking in or spying on a rival’s campaign activities and plans, disruption of a rival’s fundraising efforts by threatening would-be donors, encouraging the breakup of the rival side’s political coalition or party in the run-up to the election or bribing some rival candidates to leave or stay in the race. Dirty tricks also included, in a few special cases, assistance to the preferred side (usually an incumbent) in conducting voter fraud such as “creating” fake voters or manipulating voter rolls. Most of the known methods used by Russia in order to intervene in the 2016 U.S. elections, such as the hacking and leaking of “real” documents from the Democrat National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign and the spreading of “fake news” about Clinton, fall under this category.

 Campaigning Assistance: Increasing the capabilities or effectiveness of the assisted side’s election campaign through the provision of nonmonetary or nonmaterial assistance to the election campaign. Examples include training locals (of the preferred side only) in advanced campaigning, party organization, and get-out-the-vote techniques, designing (for the preferred side only) of campaigning materials, sending campaigning experts to provide on-the-spot assistance to the preferred side’s campaign in messaging, strategy, polling analysis, and so forth.8

 Threats or Promises: Public and specific threats or promises by an official representative of an intervening state to provide or take away a thing of value to the target state or otherwise significantly harm it in the future.

 Giving/Taking Aid: In terms of giving aid, intervening states might offer a sudden new provision of foreign aid or offer to significantly increase existing aid or other forms of material or economic assistance (such as loans, improved loan conditions, loan guarantees, trade treaties, preferred trading conditions, etc.). This aid can come directly or indirectly, say, via a multilateral international organization heavily funded by the intervening state.9 In terms of taking aid, the intervening state may withdraw part or all of its aid, preferred trading conditions, loan guarantees, and so forth.

 Other Concessions: Interventions using this method include the provision of a costly benefit by the intervening state to the target state that is noneconomic or material in its nature or main value. One example occurred as part of the Soviet intervention in the 1956 Finnish election. In order to help Prime Minister Urho Kekkonan win the presidency, the Soviets in the run-up to the election, among other things, signed an agreement with the Finnish government promising to return the Porkkala military base in full to Finnish control and sovereignty.10 Other known examples include support of a highly contentious claim by the target state for a particular piece of disputed territory, release of POWs or war criminals, or signing or revising an alliance treaty with the target state.

Just as the domestication of cattle led to cattle raiding, foreign powers began to conduct partisan electoral interventions almost as soon as meaningful competitive elections began to occur. Almost every major method of election interference used nowadays, including the various online variations used thus far, has antecedents going back to the eighteenth, nineteenth, or early twentieth centuries.

One of the first competitive national level executive elections ever conducted—the 1796 U.S. presidential election—was also the target of an overt French intervention designed to prevent George Washington’s re-election and then (after Washington decided to retire on his own volition), the election of John Adams.11 The French ambassador to the United States, Pierre Adet, sent a diplomatic message to the U.S. government enclosing a decree by the French government, both of which were made public in late October—a few days before the presidential elections in the swing state of Pennsylvania. The decree revoked the neutral status that American merchant ships had received from the French government during the Napoleonic wars, effectively restricting U.S. trade with much of Europe.12 The decree, and the accompanying diplomatic message, warned that if the U.S. government continued its current foreign policies, as a Federalist administration under John Adams obviously planned to do, it would “Cross the Line of Neutrality” vis-à-vis France and instead “become its enemy.”13

In 1797, France itself became the target of electoral interference. The British government, in an unsuccessful attempt to bring an early end to the French Revolution and eventually restore the Bourbons to power, secretly intervened in a French general election (the Election of Year V). It covertly provided approximately 10,000 pounds ($1,619,000 in 2018 dollars) in campaign funding to the candidates of a conservative coalition.14

A different tool was used in the 1877 French election. Imperial Germany intervened to prevent the ruling monarchists, who were seen as more likely to start a war with Germany, from turning France back into a monarchy under one of its former ruling houses. As Bismarck’s son, Herbert Bismarck, summarized his father’s plan, “the time has come for us to influence the French elections so extensively and as forcefully as we are able in order to convince the French voter that he would be voting for war if he were to cast his ballot for the present French Cabinet.” Bismarck accordingly created a full-fledged military crisis with France in the run-up to these elections complete with significant German troop increases on the German-French border and an embargo on the export of a key war material (horses)—a nineteenth-century equivalent of a Defcon 2 alert.15

As his invasion of Poland escalated into a worldwide conflict in 1940, Hitler became increasingly concerned about the possibility that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, if re-elected to a third term, would find a way to take the United States into the conflict. To prevent this, the Nazis began a covert intervention in the 1940 U.S. election against Roosevelt. One major aspect involved the publication in the United States of a memorandum of a conversation between Polish and American government officials in 1939, captured during the Nazi invasion of Poland, that ostensibly showed Roosevelt to be a “criminal hypocrite” and a “warmonger”—a potentially damaging revelation for the Roosevelt campaign that was then running on the promise to avoid U.S. entry into World War II if possible. To hide its role in exposing the document while assuring its wide distribution within the United States, the German chargè d’affaires in Washington, D.C., Hans Thomsen, secretly bribed the editor of an American newspaper to the tune of $5,000 ($89,680 in 2018 dollars) to publish it as an exclusive scoop, supposedly discovered by its own journalists, five days before election day on the front page of a special enlarged edition of the newspaper.16

During the Cold War, partisan electoral interventions became a common method of interference. Indeed, I have assembled the only comprehensive data set of such interventions currently available—PEIG.17 It shows that the United States and the USSR/Russia intervened in this manner 117 times between 1946 and 2000—that is, in about one of every nine competitive national level executive elections during this period (937 elections).18 Eighty-one (or 69 percent) of these interventions were done by the United States, while the other thirty-six cases (or 31 percent) were conducted by the USSR/Russia. This makes it one of the most common methods of interference since World War II, more heavily used by these two powers than more famous methods such as major military interventions or covert violent regime change operations (such as in Iran in 1953).19 The very well-known American electoral interventions in the 1948 Italian elections and the 1970 Chilean elections were thus merely two cases of a far wider post–World War II phenomena.

Sixty different states in every world region except for Oceania were the targets of meddling during this period. The targets were of various sizes and populations, ranging from small states such as Iceland and Guyana to major powers such as India, West Germany, and Brazil. Italy was the most common target (12 interventions) followed by West Germany (6), Japan (6), and Finland (4). The most common method used for intervening was campaign funding, followed by campaign assistance, and public threats or promises.

Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. and USSR/Russian interventions (64.1 percent) were covert—they were not known to the target state’s public before election day.20 Unlike the Russian intervention in 2016, therefore, the efforts of the intervening state to keep its covert intervention secret in practice were usually successful. Only five interventions of this kind (6.6 percent of all covert interventions) were inadvertently exposed prior to election day during this era. Another important aspect of such meddling is that 44.4 percent of all such cases were repeat interventions, in other words, cases in which the same intervening state, after meddling once in a particular state’s elections chose to intervene again in (one or more) subsequent elections. Seventy-one percent of the repeat interventions occurred in consecutive elections.

The post–Cold War era did not pause such meddling or the use of varying intervention methods. In 1990, for example, the United States, in an attempt to prevent Daniel Ortega from winning the 1990 Nicaraguan elections, covertly provided German newspapers information about alleged Sandinista corruption and Swiss bank accounts. The Nicaraguan opposition then used these German news reports to great effect against Ortega.21

In 1994, Russia intervened in the Belarusian presidential elections to help the then leader of Belarus, Vyacheslav Kebich, stay in power. In the run-up to the election, the Russian government supplied 2 million tons of oil to Belarus at reduced prices and modified a proposed currency agreement with it to make it more favorable.22

A few days before the 2002 Bolivian presidential elections, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Otto Reich warned that American foreign aid to Bolivia would be in danger if Evo Morales was elected. The U.S. ambassador to Bolivia repeated this threat shortly afterward.23

In the 2004 Ukrainian election, in an effort to prevent the election of the candidate of the Orange parties, Viktor Yushchenko, from winning power, Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to intervene for his main opponent, Viktor Yanukovich. Among other measures, Russian campaign advisers were sent to the Ukraine and helped Yanukovich run his campaign. Likewise, one hundred and fifty tons of campaign posters were prepared in Russia and shipped for use in his campaign. Russia may have even been involved in an attempt to poison Yushchenko with dioxin, an attempt he barely survived.24

From the available information, it appears most meddling is done by major world powers. Yet smaller states are also known to have intervened in this manner too. Iran, for example, probably intervened in the 2010 Iraqi parliamentary elections through the provision of covert funding and campaign materials for Shiite parties that were part of the National Iraqi Alliance.25 Libya under Muammar Kaddafi probably intervened, among other cases, in the 2007 French elections for Nicolas Sarkozy, providing perhaps as much as $62 million in covert funding to his campaign. According to one middleman, a Lebanese businessman, part of these funds, in suitcases stuffed with 200 and 500 euro bills, were secretly provided to Nicolas Sarkozy and his campaign manager during a visit to their offices.26 Likewise, Hugo Chavez, the former leader of Venezuela, intervened in multiple elections conducted in nearby Latin American states, such as Peru and Nicaragua.27 For example, eleven days before the 2011 Nicaraguan election, Venezuela’s energy minister, during a visit to Nicaragua, warned that the continuation of Venezuela’s foreign aid to Nicaragua, at the time estimated at around 8 percent of Nicaragua’s GDP, was contingent upon the continuation of the “revolution” in Nicaragua, that is, a third presidential term for Ortega.

Accordingly, when Putin decided in early 2016 to intervene in the U.S. presidential elections, he was utilizing a long-standing policy tool frequently used by Russia and other states to try to affect domestic developments in other states. The United States was also a common target of such foreign meddling. The interference in 2016 was the sixth such case in American history. Accordingly, except for the inadvertent exposure of this intervention, and the digitization of some long used “analog” dirty tricks, little was special or new about it.

The fact that such meddling is a long-standing common phenomenon does not imply, of course, that it is not a potential cause for concern for democracies. Instead, it means that there is a rich vein of pre-2016, predigital history of partisan electoral interventions from which we can learn much about its effects. That is the focus of the next section.

When foreign powers try to influence a key political institution in the target state—for example, the national-level elections and the process by which the executive is peacefully replaced or retained—that can naturally have many important effects. Research on this issue has so far focused on five major possible impacts: (1) their effects on political polarization in the target state; (2) their effects on the election results; (3) their effects on the target state’s democracy; (4) their effects on intrastate violence in the target state; and (5) the policy reactions usually enacted and supported by the target state’s public after the intervention.

One known effect of election interference is that such meddling, when it is overt or exposed, polarizes the electorate as to its views of the intervening state. For example, Corstange and Marinov, in a survey experiment conducted in Lebanon right after the 2009 elections, found that an American intervention for the March 14th Alliance increased support for good relations with the United States by 15 percent among supporters of this camp while reducing support for good relations by 10 percent with the United States among supporters of the rival camp (March 7th Alliance).28 A similar pattern was found by Shulman and Bloom in a survey conducted after the 2004 Ukrainian elections.29 Although Ukrainians overall strongly disliked the perceived or actual interventions by both Russia and the West in this election (with somewhat greater dislike overall of the perceived Western meddling), there was a stark divide between the regional bases of the government and the opposition candidates. Respondents in Eastern Ukraine, the political base of the then-incumbent party of these regions, were 120 percent more likely to perceive improper Western influence than an improper Russian one, while respondents in Western Ukraine, the base of the then-opposition orange parties, were 29 percent more likely to perceive improper Russian influence than the Western one.

This pattern is not confined to relatively new or fragile democracies. Tomz and Weeks in a survey experiment conducted in the United States find that, while all respondents disapproved of foreign meddling in American elections, Republicans were 20–28 percent more likely to disapprove of such an intervention when done in favor of a Democrat than one done for a Republican. Similar patterns were found among Democratic respondents.30

The differential effects, real or perceived, may be derived from the identity of the rulers and the nature of the policies that they enact or maintain in the aftermath of the intervention. It may also come, in some cases, from the act of intervention itself—such as who, for example, is more likely to receive the benefits from the promised pre-election increase in foreign aid to the target state, and so forth. Like other situations where the effects of consequential laws or major domestic policies are perceived as asymmetric, interference by a foreign power leads to varying views by different parts of the population, with the beneficiaries viewing the foreign intervening state more favorably and the harmed side viewing the foreign power in a more negative manner. Likewise, supporters of the harmed side may resent such interference, even if viewed by them as inconsequential, due to the intervening state openly showing itself to be “against them” in the same manner that sports fans dislike cheering during a sports game for the rival team. Finally, even some of those who are on the benefited side with an overall dislike of such foreign meddling may perceive them as less consequential and therefore less objectionable when they are done in favor of “their side.”31

Political polarization about the intervening state can also affect public support for important forms of interaction with it. Bush and Prather, for example, find in two survey experiments conducted in Tunisia and in the United States in the aftermath of elections in 2016 that an intervention can have significant influence on the target state’s public views on economic relations with the foreign intervening state.32 In the case of Tunisia, for example, after being told that the United States or France supported the main secularist party (Nidaa Tounes), respondents who voted for Nidaa Tounes were more likely to support an increase in trade and foreign aid with either state, while supporters for the main Islamist party (Ennahda) were more likely to oppose reception of foreign aid from either state. Likewise, in the American case, after a reference is made to the Russian intervention, Clinton voters were less interested in trade or Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from Russia and after being told of German support for Clinton, Clinton supporters supported more FDI from Germany, while Trump supporters preferred less trade with Germany.

Observers often claim that electoral interventions, when known or subsequently exposed, can have major effects on the targeted state election’s results. For example, one day after the conclusion of the American intervention against him in the 1984 Grenadian elections, Sir Eric Gairy, a former prime minister, openly blamed his defeat on the United States, whom he claimed successfully “rigged” the elections in order to guarantee his defeat.33 Forty years earlier, during a private conversation with American officials, a senior Japanese government official claimed that “many Japanese voted for” Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida in the 1953 Japanese election due to the American overt intervention on his behalf.34

The growing literature on this question indicates that such interference can, in many situations, move the needle in favor of the side preferred by the foreign power. In the first systemic study of this question, a statistical analysis of the effects of such electoral interventions by the United States and the USSR/Russia worldwide, I found that partisan electoral interventions can have major effects on the results. Such interference on average increases the vote share of the preferred side by 3 percent.35 Likewise, interventions done in public (or overtly) are usually more effective on this aspect than interventions done covertly, with the former on average increasing vote share by 3 percent more than covert interference.

My scholarship argues that the effects of such interference comes from the way that they are usually conducted. Most partisan electoral interventions involve close coordination and cooperation between the intervening state and the assisted side. Such interventions, therefore, tend to usually occur in marginal elections, that is, those in which the result is highly uncertain or one side lags but remains electorally viable. In such situations, election interference is most likely to have a significant effect on the results of the election. Likewise, because of these dynamics, the intervening state will usually not intervene overtly unless informed by the aided side that a domestic backlash will not occur prior to the election. When backlash is unlikely, overt interventions are expected to be more effective because the intervening state can outbid the local politicians for the target state public’s support. It can also usually provide more resources to the preferred side in an overt intervention than in a covert one.

In a follow-up study, I identified one circumstance in which such meddling is ineffective, if not harmful, for the assisted side: electoral interventions in the first competitive elections after a long period of authoritarian rule or gaining independence (i.e., founding elections).36 In those situations, the interference is counterproductive, reducing the vote share of the preferred side by 6.7 percent on average. The contrary effect in these situations is due to the inexperience of the assisted side with elections and with how to campaign effectively for office, leading it to frequently request from the intervening state methods of interventions that are ineffective or counterproductive in that electoral context, thus leading to unintentional harm to itself.

My work is not the only one that finds electoral interference effective under certain circumstances. Bubeck and Marinov find, in a difference of means analysis of a sample of such American meddling, that when the United States is the only foreign intervening state in an election, and its intervention is for the incumbent, that incumbent is more likely to gain votes.37 In contrast, when the election included a second intervening state that intervened for the other side, the effects cancel out, and neither side usually gains overall.

The closely related literature on the effects of foreign meddling on the results of referendums also finds that it has significant effects in the direction desired by the intervening state. Walter and others, for example, analyze the effects of the German and EU intervention in the July 2015 bailout referendum in Greece, finding that it increased support for the EU-proposed bailout package by 10 percent on average.38 This effect seems to have been largely due to the overt intervention convincing many Greek voters that voting against the bailout agreement would lead to a (widely undesirable) exit from the European Union (or “Grexit”)—one of the key messages which Germany and the European Union tried to convey to the Greek voters prior to the referendum. Matush discovers that the American intervention in the 2016 Brexit referendum had similar effects.39 President Barack Obama’s open threat during an official visit to Britain in April 2016 that in case of a vote in favor of leaving the European Union, the United Kingdom would be sent to the “back of the queue” in any subsequent negotiations of a separate U.S.-U.K. trade agreement, reduced support for the leave side by 11 percent on average in the areas of the United Kingdom most heavily reliant economically on their exports to the United States.40

Naturally, the most (in)famous recent case of such interference—the Russian intervention in the 2016 U.S. elections—has been an important site of significant research on this question. That research has been finding increasing, albeit still hotly contested, evidence that the Russian intervention indeed provided significant assistance to Trump.41 Jamieson, for example, in a careful analysis focused mostly on the effect of the covert Russian spread of propaganda and “fake news” through social media, estimates that this aspect of the Russian intervention had a major impact on the election results.42 She finds that the Russian government was able to widely spread its fake news and election propaganda and target them toward the most persuadable audiences (potential or mobilizable Trump voters and “soft” or demobilizable Clinton voters). Likewise, the messages were well designed and highly congruent with the Trump campaign’s own messaging and interests. As a result, she argues that the intervention probably had thrown the election to Trump.43

Other research on the effects of Russian cyber propaganda and fake news in 2016 has been reaching similar conclusions. A statistical analysis of the election-related propaganda covertly spread by Russia through Twitter found that increases in the amounts of retweets of such tweets sent by the Internet Research Agency44 through its various hidden proxies in the run-up to the election accurately predicted shifts in public opinion toward Trump.45 An increase of about 25,000 retweets of such messages (assumed to reflect just part of the wider Russian propaganda campaign) are estimated to have predicted an increase of 1 percent in polling for Trump a week afterward. The authors, however, admit that their research is unable to establish full causality in this case.46 Likewise, Gutner and others, focusing on the effects of fake news (much of it spread by Russia) on 2012 Obama voters who switched to Trump in 2016 found significant effects of such disinformation.47 In a survey of such voters conducted after the elections, Gutner and others discover that belief in such fake news increased the probability of defecting to Trump by 18 percent—a factor only second in its strength to whether they had positive views of Hillary Clinton or not (20 percent less likely).48

Another recent analysis by me49 focused instead on the effects of the leaks of the hacked Russian documents that were spread through WikiLeaks. I found that the Russian intervention increased overall Trump’s vote share by 2.03 percent—enough to give him seventy-five electoral college votes and an electoral college victory. Drilling into the effects of the leaks using pre-election survey data, the mere exposure to the leaks was sufficient, for example, to significantly reduce the probability of voting for Clinton among Independents and Republicans (by –17.6 percent and –20.2 percent, respectively), counteracting much of the negative effects of some domestic pre-election leaks against Trump (such as the “Access Hollywood” tape). Using Google keyword data, I also found significant interest in WikiLeaks throughout the United States in the run-up to the elections, including hundreds of thousands of searches each month in the three key swing states (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) that gave Trump his victory.

However, most scholars of American politics50 are still highly skeptical about these arguments.51 For example, Sides and others following an analysis of a six wave poll of overall voting preferences before and after the elections, claimed to have observed no significant shifts in voters’ views of Clinton or voting intentions as a result of the leaks of the hacked DNC documents.52 They also argue, based on existing data on the domestic spending by both campaigns on ads of various kinds, as well as domestically produced political memes and partisan content, that the Russian-sponsored content was an “infinitesimal fraction” of the overall political content to which voters were exposed to prior to the election—and therefore quite unlikely to be of any consequence.53 Likewise, in regard to the effects of “fake news,” for example, Guess and others argue, based on a post-election survey combined with data on the respondents’ actual web traffic history, that it largely reached a very small subgroup of the American population that was already highly conservative and strongly pro-Trump.54

Election interference, when done by the United States or by another liberal power, is frequently seen in the West as an effective tool for promoting or protecting democracy. In one recent case, in the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring, members of the U.S. foreign policy community called on President Obama to intervene in favor of the liberal groups in the forthcoming elections of the postrevolutionary Arab states (such as Egypt and Tunisia) in order to make sure that actual or perceived antidemocratic forces in the region did not “spoil” the transition. For example, representative Howard Berman, among other members of the U.S. Congress, declared in early 2011 that “our [the United States’] job is to create an alternative” to the Muslim Brotherhood.55 Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, claimed in a Washington Post op-ed that the “U.S. must take sides to keep the Arab Spring from Islamist takeover.”56 Many others concurred.57 Even some of the pundits who opposed the use of electoral interventions in specific cases agree with supporters that such interference, when wielded by a liberal power, can usually be an effective tool for promoting and protecting democracy.58 In contrast, electoral interference by authoritarian powers is usually perceived as harmful for democracy.

A growing body of research on this question finds partisan election interference by either kind of intervening state to usually have quite negative effects on the target state’s democracy. My own research, for example, employing a statistical analysis of the effects of such American and USSR/Russian interventions worldwide between 1946 and 2000 found that a successful intervention (i.e., one in which the assisted side won) significantly increased the chances of a democratic breakdown in the targeted state in the following five years by a factor of 2.5 to 8 times.59 The effects of USSR/Russian interventions were a bit more harmful under some measures, but the effects of either power were both quite negative. Furthermore, interventions in relatively competitive elections in transitional or competitive authoritarian regimes60 did not increase the chances of the target state to democratize.61

Tomz and Weeks, in a survey experiment conducted in the United States, find that an electoral intervention leads to serious damage to three key aspects of a healthy democracy.62 The first is a drop in trust in the integrity of the electoral system (by between 16 percent and 53 percent). The second is a decrease in the share of the public interested in voting in a future election (by between 4 percent and 12 percent). The third is a decline in faith in American democracy overall (by between 10 percent and 33 percent). The exact identity of the foreign intervening state noted in the experiment had little effect on these results. The decrease is smaller for methods of intervention which are overt (such as pre-election threats) in comparison to methods that are usually covert, such as the release of false information about a certain candidate or party, and become public knowledge due to inadvertent exposure.

A third study, focusing on the credibility of elections (a key factor in shaping attitudes on democracy) has found a negative yet conditional effect. In a set of survey experiments conducted in Georgia and in the United States, Bush and Prather found that the effects of a public or exposed meddling depended on the perceived capabilities of the meddler.63 Respondents who perceived the intervening state as being capable of affecting elections saw the results of the election as significantly less credible and vice versa. Naturally, interventions by major powers, which are usually expected to have greater capability to affect other states’ internal affairs, would accordingly be expected to cause more advertent and inadvertent harm to the credibility of the intervened target state’s elections. Likewise, given that high levels of political polarization are also a well-known factor in the processes that frequently leads to democratic breakdowns,64 the finding in section IV.A on the effects of such interference on polarization also indirectly indicates serious harm to the target state’s democracy.65

Election interference seems to damage the target state’s democracy through a few pathways. First, when the foreign intervention is public or exposed, knowledge of such interference may lead parts of the targeted public, especially on the losing side, to question how reflective of their will are the results of the elections.66 Decreasing belief that the results of the elections accurately reflect their preferences can reduce their desire to vote or to participate in other peaceful political activities, thus sapping overall support for democracy. Furthermore, by reducing trust in the integrity of the election system and in a state’s democratic institutions, electoral interventions can create a feedback loop in which such beliefs make it harder for the government to effectively govern and rally public support for its side, leading to more ineffective governance, which reduces even further the public’s trust and faith in democracy.67

Second, when the electoral intervention is covert it can damage the target state’s democracy in various ways. Due to the need for strict secrecy in order for a covert intervention to remain hidden (and the more morally dubious acts it frequently entails, such as spreading disinformation and so forth), the types of aided leaders who request such assistance are likely to have authoritarian tendencies and to try to undermine their state’s democratic institutions once in power.68 Likewise, many forms of covert intervention encourage corruption, a well-known cause of democratic breakdown.69 This is because many types of interference that are usually done in a covert manner would usually be considered, if done by domestic actors, as serious forms of political corruption (i.e., breaking into the competing party’s offices prior to an election in search of useful information, secret unreported campaign donations from local firms, etc.).70 Furthermore, the resources provided in such meddling, due to their highly covert nature, are an extremely easy target for “skimming” by the assisted side’s politicians for their personal use. As a result, the provision of such assistance can corrupt the recipient leaders, which, in turn, will spread such bad practices to their underlings.71 Indeed senior American officials in charge of supervising such covert interventions by the CIA were already complaining in the late 1950s that one of the effects of such meddling was “spreading a little more corruption.”72

In 1957, the U.S. government assisted with campaign funding and other methods the then-president of Lebanon, Camille Chamoun, in the Lebanese parliamentary elections (the body that, under Lebanon’s constitution at the time, would be in charge of selecting Lebanon’s next president a few months later). The success of Chamoun’s supporters in this election, and the widespread expectation that Chamoun would use this victory to change the Lebanese constitution and subsequently have parliament select him for a second term, ignited a wave of protests throughout Lebanon, protests that escalated into a brief civil war a few months afterward.73 Nineteen years later, the United States openly interfered in the 1976 Italian elections in favor of the Christian Democratic incumbents with, among other things, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger publicly warning in the run-up that a victory by their main opponents, the Italian Communist Party, would lead to serious damage to NATO and to other “serious consequences” for Italy. The Communist Party’s defeat in this election greatly disappointed the Italian far left, a disappointment that caused some left-wing Italian radicals to give up on electoral politics and turn to terrorism. This turn led in the following four years to the creation of a new terrorist group and a significant increase in the amounts of domestic left-wing terrorism.74

There is growing evidence that domestic violence and instability in the aftermath of electoral interventions is no coincidence. I have found, for example, that in the aftermath of an overt foreign electoral intervention that succeeds in placing its preferred candidate or party in power increases the amounts of domestic terrorism in the target state.75 Overall in those circumstances, the chances of a new terrorist group being created in a state rises by 10.5 percent, and the overall number of domestic terrorist incidents increase by 152 percent, an unintentional effect that is on par in their magnitude to the effects of intentional state sponsorship of terrorist groups.76

The success of such interference reduces the political efficacy of peaceful politics for the losing side (both in practice and in public perception), thus unintentionally increasing the utility of violent politics for some of the more radical members of that camp. Likewise, when electoral interventions are done in an overt manner they are frequently perceived by some people on the losing side as evidence that their government has effectively become a “puppet” of the intervening state and therefore illegitimate. Reduced regime legitimacy, in turn, increases the effectiveness of an existing terrorist group’s propaganda and recruitment efforts while also encouraging the formation of new terrorist groups.

In the aftermath of the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, multiple senior elected officials, commentators, and former members of U.S. intelligence agencies described these Russian acts in extremely harsh terms (e.g., from “the equivalent of Pearl Harbor”77 to “an act of war”78 to a “9/11-Scale event”79). These comments implied that severe retaliation by the target state against a foreign government that interferes in its elections is a commonplace and natural reaction.

However, in practice, a careful overview of the known cases of foreign electoral meddling since World War II shows how rarely the target state attempts to “punish” the intervening state for such acts. This is the case even when the side that the foreign power intervened against nevertheless won the elections. Given the usual power differentials between the intervening state and the target state, it seems that the harmed leader usually prefers to let “bygones be bygones” when it comes to unsuccessful electoral interference rather than further inflame or ignite a rivalry with a far stronger state.80 The American government’s imposition of additional economic sanctions on Russia in the aftermath of the exposure of its intervention in 2016 is a rare exception to the usual pattern of nonreaction to meddling when it is overt or exposed.81

From the limited information available thus far, there also seems to usually be little public support within the target state for costly or harsh methods of retaliation to such interference. This is the case even in strong states that usually have the capability to react in this manner. For example, Tomz and Weeks in a survey experiment in the United States find little support for military retaliation even for the most egregious exposed meddling (such as the spreading of accurate or fake news or funding of one side’s election campaign), with only 15 percent of the American public supporting a U.S. military strike in such a situation, and only 25 percent supporting military threats.82 The only measures for which there is majority support are diplomatic (59 percent) or economic (72 percent) sanctions. When less egregious forms of interference (such as pre-election threats) are used by a foreign power in an American election, support for military options is even lower, and there is no support among a majority of Americans for any form of retaliation. When a foreign power, especially a major power, openly interferes in an election in another state, it has a good reason to believe that, at least in the short term, it will avoid any immediate retaliation from the target state for its actions.

As this brief overview indicates, decision makers and the general public in democracies around the world have good reason to worry about election interference in their elections. Such partisan electoral interventions are quite common. They have been conducted in one out of every nine elections since World War II and utilized by many different state actors. These intervening states have used a wide repertoire of tools for this purpose, from overt threats to campaign funding and various dirty tricks. Many such interventions remained a secret for years after the interference had concluded.

The small but rapidly growing research on the effects of electoral interference already provides strong indications that it can have major effects and cause serious harm to the target state in many circumstances. Electoral interventions can frequently have significant influence on the intervened election results, enough in many plausible situations to determine the identity of the winner. They can cause serious damage to the target state’s democracy regardless of the intervening state’s identity and significantly increase the chances of its collapse into an authoritarian regime. Such interference also polarizes the target state’s view about the intervening state. Finally, such meddling can also increase the chances of internal violence in the target state, raising, for example, the amount of domestic terrorism in the target state as well as the probability of new terrorist groups emerging there.

The number of known election interference cases using cyber tools is too small at present to analyze in any systemic manner. Nevertheless, there are two strong substantive reasons to believe that, when the data is eventually available to systematically analyze meddling conducted using cyber tools or digital methods, the effects will not be significantly different or less negative in nature then their offline or analog brethren.

First, all of the meddling methods known to have been used digitally thus far have merely been the same wine in different glass bottles. Every major component of the Russian intervention in 2016, to give one key example, could have been conducted by Russia in an alternate universe in which the internet did not exist using tried-and-true meddling methods—from using long-standing informants or compromised employees inside the DNC in order to take out some “embarrassing” documents to encouraging or bribing American journalists to publish news articles about the leaked documents or any other “fake news” about Hillary Clinton that they wanted to spread. Using the internet in the manner used thus far for electoral interventions (or other plausible future ways) is the equivalent of using Amazon.com to buy a paperback book instead of going to a local bookstore for this purpose—the product is provided to the recipient through a different method, but its nature is identical.

Second, one key factor frequently referred to in the public debate regarding the supposedly unprecedented nature of much such cyber meddling—the digital distribution methods—have some important limitations compared to the older “traditional” media at their prime. It is probably true that the use of Facebook and Twitter for the Russian intervention in 2016 sometimes led more Americans to encounter a particular piece of “fake news” in 2016 then, say, “planting” it in a few regular U.S. newspapers circa 1956 would have. However, there is a big, well-known difference: in the consumption habits of information provided through each delivery method. For example, many more people in 1956 were likely to have carefully read such a newspaper article and believed its contents than nowadays to believe one of the endless posts on their Twitter or Facebook feeds by one of the people they follow. Indeed, many people nowadays when online “like” or retweet links to articles that they have not bothered to read whatsoever. These trade-offs between these two information distribution methods probably lead overall to a more or less equal number of targeted people significantly affected by such “fake news.”

Accordingly, policymakers, practitioners, and scholars in charge of formulating policy solutions for and combating online interference at home or abroad need to keep in mind a few key lessons from the research on this topic thus far. First, they need to be aware of the likely limitations the targets of such interference (or third parties) face in formulating a response to such meddling once it is known to have occurred. As noted, senior decision makers, even when they were the target of such meddling, are usually wary of trying to retaliate against the intervening state out of fear of worsening relations. Likewise, even publics in very powerful democracies, such as the United States, show little support for harsh methods of retaliation (such as military action) and may even oppose the use of sanctions of various kinds following the use of most methods of intervention against them.

Furthermore, much interference is covert and is unlikely to be detected at any level of certainty prior to the conclusion of an election and for years afterward. The case of the 2016 U.S. election where, due to Russian incompetence and what seems to be well-placed American intelligence sources,83 both the intervention and the identity of the intervening state were quickly discovered with rather high levels of certainty, is unlikely to soon repeat itself in the future.

Second, as section IV.C shows, trying to fight fire with fire (e.g., intervening in another state’s elections in order to promote democracy or to counter another state’s own intervention) can have equally bad side effects. It may increase the chances of a democratic breakdown in the targeted state. A democratic intervening state can cause almost as much harm to a state’s democracy as an authoritarian one in this manner. Accordingly, policy solutions meant to deal with such meddling should focus more on harm minimization and prevention rather than on retaliation, counterinterventions, or deterrence.

Third, policymakers must avoid the “fighting the last war” syndrome when trying to deal with partisan election meddling. Since 2016, most policymaker, practitioner, and scholarly efforts in this regard have focused on ways to detect, stop, or at least minimize the effects of the key methods used by Russia in its intervention in 2016 (such as the spreading of propaganda and fake news through social media). Naturally, efforts in this regard are quite important. However, as noted, there are a wide range of other methods or tools that foreign powers have used; “dirty tricks”—the main method used by Russia in 2016—was not even one of the most popular among meddlers. A future attempt by Russia or by other powers to meddle in the elections of democracies with “problematic” leaders or candidates may thus use a different intervention method. Accordingly, more attention must be given to dealing with those methods as well, either in their existing forms or in the possible ways by which they can be “digitized” in the future.