World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies

Barcelona, July 19th - 24th 2010

 < NOT_DEFINED backto Politics

29-'TEIM' Election Watch of MENA and Muslim Countries: An Online Project of Electoral Academic Observation - NOT_DEFINED activity_field_Poster
 

· NOT_DEFINED institution: Autonomous University of Madrid & Director of TEIM Election Watch

· NOT_DEFINED organizer: Rafael Bustos & Luciano Zaccara

· NOT_DEFINED language: English

· NOT_DEFINED description: TEIM Election Watch was created in 2006 as part of TEIM (Taller de Estudios Internacionales Mediterráneos/Mediterranean International Studies Workshop) at the Autonomous University of Madrid. At this time, the Election Watch is made up of 20 people, including researchers and junior and senior professors. TEIM Election Watch receives financing from public and private entities in Spain. Our main task is academic election observation. This type of observation is very different from the international election observation carried out by organisations like the OSCE, EU, UN, AU, etc. Academic election observation does not consist of the wide-scale deployment of observers carrying out pre-established, systematic work. On the contrary, academic observation consists of using the prior knowledge of specialists in the country as well as their contacts to make a fundamentally qualitative evaluation. The academic observer also goes to the polling locations, but, furthermore, works with other local academics and with election observation organisations in the country, when they exist. Academic observation is independent by its very nature and its reports and analyses are not subject to the criteria of political opportunity. TEIM Election Watch team monitors elections in 30 countries, taking the Maghreb and the Middle East as the centre and extending to Muslim countries further away in Asia and Europe, ranging from Indonesia to Mauritania. This election monitoring translates into the following products:
-Country reports, with data on the political and electoral systems, etc.
-Election Profiles (EP), reports on the elections
-Pre-election analyses (PA)?
-Election news, constantly updated.
-Eventual analyses (EA), on specific questions
-Republications (RP) (of articles already published elsewhere)
-Working Papers (WP), longer and more detailed
-Election activities, like seminars, courses, conferences, etc.
TEIM Election Watch’s information is continuously updated and available free of charge online on its webpage: http://www.observatorioelectoral.es. All of the contents, including the news and main documents, are translated into English and displayed on their own webpage http://www.election-watch.org. Our modern, intuitive webpage format makes it possible to work on a team basis while developing a powerful database. With the database we are creating, it will be possible to make detailed searches, for example, on the score record of a particular political party or on the modifications in a country’s electoral law. Visitors will also be able to create tables and make comparisons between countries as well as to research through different categories.