Description
This paper investigates international election observation as a transnational field in which liberal ordering logics are enacted, reproduced, and contested. Drawing on a Bourdieu-inspired practice approach, I analyze how election observers produce “electoral truth”. Based on participant observation on OSCE and EU missions between 2022 and 2025, 17 interviews with election observers, and a career trajectory database, the study traces how hierarchies, tacit norms, and reporting routines sustain the field’s epistemic authority through narratives of neutrality and technicality. Election observation, I argue, embodies a domain characterized by asymmetric professionalization, stratified authority, and the continuous negotiation of legitimacy across transnational and national boundaries. The doxic belief in the superiority and universality of a Schumpeterian-Dahlian model of liberal democracy provides coherence to the field, while moments of interpretive struggle - within missions and across organizations - reveal its endogenous contestedness. As such, election observation is not merely a technical exercise but a socio-politically embedded practice that illuminates how global actors sustain and contest liberal ordering on a micro-level. By reinterpreting election observation through a sociological lens, the paper contributes to IPS debates on transnational fields and the micro-politics of liberal international ordering, foregrounding the productive tensions between neutrality, authority, and contestation in Bourdieusian field analysis.
