4. Case study: Serbia 4.1. Legal framework and key issues with administration of electoral justice Serbia’s first multi-party election took place in 1990. Prior to that year, Serbia and socialist Yugoslavia had so-called ‘plebiscitary’ elections, where the electorate could not choose between multiple candidates, or where any multiple candidates did not essentially stand for different political options. This approach to elections was founded on the principle that the right to govern was not based on the will of the people expressed in an election, but rather on the historical merit of the ruling League of Communists. After the introduction of ‘socialist selfmanagement’, the electoral process in Yugoslavia was managed according to a different model from those in ‘people’s democracies’. Whilst these countries of ‘real socialism’ achieved control over the outcomes of elections by preventing more than one candidate from standing, in Yugoslavia the approach was based on multiple tiers of indirect elections: the so-called ‘delegate system’ resulted in the immediate connection between delegates and voters being lost in the multitude of indirect elections, so that candidates were actually selected by the senior ranks of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY). Elections were neither free nor fair, nor were they ultimately material. The bodies to which candidates were elected, such as the National Assembly and regional and local legislatures, were deprived of any real influence, which was instead wielded by the League of Communists, or, rather, given the ruling party’s multi-faceted character, by its top echelons. The heterogeneity of the League of Communists was reflected in the fact that all other political organisations and institutions were in fact nothing more than other outward forms of the LCY and its inner governing core. Even though elections essentially had no importance and did not permit competition between political ideas, manifestos, and parties, socialist Yugoslavia not only maintained them, but made them into a major feature of the political iconography of the ‘self-managing’ nation. Firstly, the results of elections were used in external propaganda to legitimize the regime, and, secondly, they created the sense in a part of the population that they could make a meaningful contribution to political life. Some scholars believe that regimes in both the people’s democracies and Yugoslavia endured not only because of repression and fear, but also with the support of a large proportion of the people. To support these claims, they cite the results of the first free elections of 1990, where the formerly communist parties in most of the region’s countries were defeated but nonetheless succeeded in attracting a large share of the vote, even winning in Bulgaria and two Yugoslav republics, Serbia and Montenegro. These considerations reveal that elections in Serbia routinely involved no political competition for an extended period of time. When this conclusion is coupled with the fact that the regime which administered those elections was legitimate, it appears that Serbian voters see closely controlled elections as ‘normal’, and that a government elected in such a poll can be perceived as having legitimacy even if its electoral victory was preceded by distortion of political competition through an unfair electoral process and pressure on voters. Nevertheless, over the past 20 years the electoral process has been improved and enhanced in accordance with international standards and principles with the aim of democratizing society 20