Over the past decades, international election observation has become an institutionalized and widely accepted norm of the global democratic order. Even regimes with pronounced authoritarian characteristics rarely outright refuse to allow international missions. This empirical persistence poses an analytical challenge: how do electoral authoritarian regimes manage the potential political costs of international monitoring without rejecting the norm itself? This article offers a conceptual clarification of existing approaches to the dynamics of international norms, moving beyond the compliance-non-compliance dichotomy and complementing the debate on norm capture. We introduce and theoretically substantiate the concept of neutralization—a strategy by which authoritarian regimes do not redefine a norm’s content but fragment the interpretive power surrounding it, preventing the formation of a single authoritative conclusion about the quality of elections. Neutralization is realized through the institutional fragmentation of missions, selective access restrictions, discursive delegitimization of critical assessments, and the creation of procedural opacity. The study draws on a deductive model that combines regime type and actors’ positioning within the supply–demand mechanism for international observation, thereby identifying four strategic logics: norm-making, legitimation, norm capture, and neutralization. A review of patterns across several electoral processes in different regions suggests that neutralization manifests as a managed pluralism of assessments, with international presence maintained. However, its capacity to generate binding interpretive closure is systematically weakened. Theoretically, the article advances research on international norms by analyzing the struggle for epistemic power as a key dimension of global governance. It demonstrates that the institutional stability of a norm does not necessarily indicate its consolidation: under conditions of authoritarian adaptation, the preservation of form can be accompanied by a weakening of the norm’s political impacts.
Milanese et al. (Tue,) studied this question.