The international community has long sent democracy aid, and technical election assistance (TEA) has become increasingly popular in the last three decades. Despite these investments, little is known about the effects of TEA. This master thesis focuses on how TEA affects violence during elections and asks if and how does technical election assistance prevent electoral violence in some contexts and not in others? I argue the TEA that is provided to both state and non-state actors in combination can reduce electoral violence. I argue that this can make elections credible and that credible elections are less probable to turn violent. By conducting case studies on Kenya, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe using Structured Focused Comparison, this thesis finds that the hypothesis when a state receives comprehensive technical election assistance, it will experience a reduction in electoral violence gets limited support. The findings show that TEA can help reduce violence since violence was reduced in all three cases, but only two of them received comprehensive TEA.

La tesi analizza le politiche di promozione della democrazia messe in atto dall'Unione Europea, al fine di inquadrare queste ultime nell'ambito del dibattito sulla dimensione internazionale dei processi di democratizzazione. L'opera si divide in due parti. La prima parte, teorica, pone le basi per la comprensione dei concetti di democrazia, democratizzazione, e dell'influenza del sistema internazionale sui processi di democratizzazione. La seconda parte, empirica, applica tali nozioni, e la definizione di politiche di promozione della democrazia, al caso specifico. Obiettivo della tesi è quello di mostrare la peculiarità dell'azione dell'UE nell'ambito delle politiche di promozione della democrazia. / The thesis analyses EU's democracy promotion policies in order to put these latter in relation to the wider debate on the international dimension of democratization. It is divided into two parts. The first, mainly theoretical draws the foundations for the understanding of the concepts of democracy, democratization, and the international dimension of democratization. The second part, empirical, apply these notions and the definition of democracy promotion policies, to the specific case of the EU. The goal is to show the peculiarity of EU's action in this field.

This essay focus on the European Union and its democracy both from a national perspec­tive and from an international perspective. Furthermore, the essay center on the con­cept of democratic deficit, this in order to study the European Union´s status regarding the democratic legitimacy. This study intends to nuance the problems that previous research and previous researchers have de­fined as democratic deficits in the European Union and ends up in conducting a textual anal­ysis of the latest European Union treaty, the Lisbon Treaty. The aim is that by using previous research on the democratic deficit in the European Union examine whether the Lisbon Treaty has enhanced the EU's position regarding democratic legitimacy. In other words, my study aims to identify what the deficit is and if it exists. The results show that the Lisbon Treaty has been trying to improve the democratic legitimacy and that some practical adjustments have been made, but it also show that there is much that still can be improved before citizens have full democratic rights.