WHY HAVE AN ONLINE ELECTION WATCH ABOUT THE ARAB AND ISLAMIC WORLD?

Because it meets the demands of a growing interest within the research and academic communities worldwide about the political processes of the Arab and Islamic world.

Furthermore, being the first of its kind in Spanish covering this group of countries, freely accessible on the Internet, TEIM Election Watch is an interactive tool continually adapted to developments taking place. TEIM Election Watch allows us to follow these developments, analyse them quantatively and, what is more important, interpret them using a set of standardised criteria.

An added value of this Election Watch is the involvement of a team of senior and junior researchers, who undertake field work in the Arab-Islamic countries and regularly mobilize to cover the elections in situ. These specialists, in some cases carry out their work with the support of institutions and researchers from the countries being studied.

Conception and objectives

TEIM Election Watch undertakes the analysis of electoral processes in the states that comprise large parts of the Muslim world from Morocco and Mauritania in the West to Malaysia and Indonesia in the East), and follows the changes in their political systems (party systems and electoral legislation), as well as the effects these changes have on the main electoral contests (presidential and legislative polls).

TEIM Election Watch assumes the perspective of comparative political science and as such, intends to break with cultural and religious determinisms, showing that the election comparative techniques that have been applied to other geographic areas, can be applied to our study area, without ruling out possible inter-regional comparisons.

TEIM Election Watch enables us to obtain an evaluation (both qualitative and quantitative) of the democratic effect any election has on its country's political system. It thus goes beyond typical electoral analyses limited to lists of quantitative elements (participation rates, results, etc.), by instead carrying out in-depth assessments of electoral processes based on these elements and other non quantitative data.