Organizational capacity and institutional credibility in digital electoral reform: a systematic review of electoral management bodies

Abstract

Digital technologies are now embedded across electoral administration, including voter registration, biometric identification, electronic voting, results transmission, cybersecurity, and election information systems. Their democratic value depends on whether electoral management bodies can govern them credibly. This review examines how organizational capacity is related to institutional credibility in digital electoral reform and clarifies the institutional conditions under which digital systems become trustworthy, auditable, accountable, and publicly intelligible. The review question was structured using a PICOS framework, and the review followed PRISMA 2020. Searches were conducted in Scopus and Web of Science for English-language peer-reviewed articles and reviews published between 2010 and 2025. After deduplication, screening, and eligibility assessment, 140 studies were included. The review applied structured data extraction, study quality appraisal, framework synthesis, and thematic synthesis. A meta-analysis was not undertaken because the corpus was heterogeneous in design, country context, technology type, institutional setting, and outcome definition. The synthesis shows that digital electoral reform is an institutional governance challenge. The reviewed literature links credible implementation to technical capacity, data governance, cybersecurity, auditability, legal-regulatory authority, human resources, procurement and vendor oversight, coordination, and public communication. Digital systems can strengthen electoral integrity when they improve accuracy, inclusion, verification, traceability, and transparency, but they may weaken legitimacy when they generate opacity, exclusion, system failure, data error, cyber vulnerability, vendor dependence, or distrust. The review advances the capacity-credibility perspective as an interpretive framework rather than a causal model. Institutional credibility is produced not by technology adoption alone, but by the ability of electoral institutions to make digital procedures secure, auditable, accountable, inclusive, correctable, and publicly intelligible.