I am grateful to Nikolay Marinov for his thoughtful and insightful review, which provides an excellent summary of my book’s contributions and includes several interesting and important questions for future research. In this response, I address two questions Marinov raises about other interventions and state actors, and I offer two promising avenues for future work on aid effectiveness and subnational approaches.

First, why focus on observation and technical assistance? These are the two primary types of international election support (Thomas Carothers, “Elections and Democracy Support,” GSDRC 2015, 20–21), with about 60% of elections in Africa and Latin America observed and about 30% percent receiving technical assistance. I agree that many other policy interventions also take place around election times, potentially influencing election credibility and violence. In other work, I have examined seven of these interventions, including police training and youth programs (Jonas Claes and Inken von Borzyskowski, “What Works in Preventing Election Violence: Evidence from Liberia and Kenya,” 2018). Additionally, Birch and Muchlinski examine capacity building and attitude-changing programs, while Pokharel provides insights on diplomacy (Sarah Birch and David Muchlinski, “Electoral Violence Prevention: What Works?” Democratization 25, 2017; Bhojraj Pokharel, Preventing Election Violence through Diplomacy, 2019). As Marinov suggests, examining other types of election intervention, such as whether or how (threats of) sanctions or pro-autocracy aid influence election violence, is an interesting avenue for future research.

Second, what about state actors? How does the provision of foreign aid by states influence election violence, and when do states accept the help they are given? Marinov rightly points out that states also provide election aid directly; exploring the extent, forms, and effects of such direct state aid on election violence would be a great complement to my book and a valuable addition to this research field. We should note, however, that many states channel election support through IOs. For example, the United States channels much of it through NGOs such as the National Democratic Institute, International Republican Institute, and International Foundation for Electoral Systems. Similarly, US embassies in host countries support programming implemented through international and local NGOs. Although states fund some democracy- and elections-supporting programs directly, they also usually make budget contributions to IOs such as the UN, EU, OSCE, OAS, and AU, which then facilitate such programs on the ground. On the receiving end, I have examined the demand and supply of election assistance in a previous article (Inken von Borzyskowski, “Resisting Democracy Assistance: Who Seeks and Receives Technical Election Assistance?” Review of International Organizations 11, 2016). The book builds on these earlier insights to better account for selection dynamics underlying aid provision (pp. 67–68, 79–87).

Additionally, Marinov raises an important question for future work with regard to whether aid effects have institutional staying power. Ideally, technical assistance will render itself obsolete, but only if this support builds institutional capacity, rather than simply filling short-term gaps. Assessing the cumulative or long-term effectiveness of election aid over several electoral cycles is a promising avenue for future work.

Finally, I support Marinov’s call for more subnational research. My fieldwork in Liberia and Kenya has shaped my thinking about external election support and local efforts in election management to mitigate violence. Subnational work can advance our understanding of election management, the geography of election violence, how it sometimes intersects with other forms of political violence, how often it may be spontaneous rather than strategic, and the many other open questions in this growing research field (Sarah Birch, Ursula Daxecker, and Kristine Höglund, “Electoral Violence: An Introduction,” Journal of Peace Research 57, 2020).