According to a convincing new paper (ungated version here) by political scientists Alberto Simpser and Daniela Donno, the answer is a definite yes.

As election monitoring has increased, governments intent on cheating have learned to strategically adapt, relying less on election-day fraud, and instead increasing their use of pre-election manipulation that is less likely to be criticized and punished…

We argue that when election monitoring missions encourage an increase in pre-election manipulation, they can unwittingly have negative effects on institutional quality and governance. While the effects of ballot fraud are generally limited to influencing electoral outcomes, many pre-election tools of manipulation—such as restricting media freedom and undermining judicial independence—have additional and much deeper consequences for the rule of law, bureaucratic quality, and governmental accountability.

We put our proposition to the test using an original dataset of 944 elections in 144 countries around the world, from 1990 to 2007. The dataset features comprehensive information on the presence of election monitoring missions from 12 reputable international organizations and NGOs. In a series of quantitative analyses, we find evidence that highquality election monitoring missions are associated with a decrease in the rule of law, bureaucratic quality, and media freedom. This finding is robust to a number of specifications, including an instrumental-variables approach that corrects for the possibility that monitoring could be endogenous to changes in governance.

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