Electoral Manipulation

Transnational crime networks depend on favorable local conditions at the production and distribution ends of their markets. Generating environments that guarantee both a minimum exposure to risks and an optimization of profit starts by ensuring some degree of local control over territories and governance structures. Electoral processes open a window of opportunity for transnational crime networks to gain influence and control over state administrations and decision makers, justice, governance, and public resource allocation. Through electoral manipulations, transnational crime networks protect and promote their interests by establishing or consolidating links to the state through the distortion of political competition in order to keep functional alliances with local, regional, and/or national political leadership. While all democracies are exposed to different degrees of electoral manipulation by transnational crime, ...