The Portability of Electoral Procedural Fairness: Evidence from Experimental Studies in China and the United States

Elections are now a common feature of countries across regime types, yet we know little about what leads people to perceive an election as fair, or how the democratic context shapes the ingredients of fairness judgments. While the conduct of a process is most important for perceptions of fairness in established democracies, "procedural fairness" may not travel to non-democracies, where economic outcomes occasionally take precedence over procedure. Additionally, individual level characteristics, such as political engagement, may also shape how people view the fairness of elections. Using original experiments conducted in the United States and China, I find procedural considerations are most important for fairness judgments, across democratic contexts and largely independent of political engagement.