Crisis-Ridden Elections (Again) in the Dominican Republic: Neopatrimonialism, Presidentialism, and Weak Electoral Oversight

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Abstract
For only the fifth time since 1978, the Dominican Republic held concurrent elections in 1994 for candidates at every level of government — presidential, congressional and municipal. The most important of these contests, for the presidency, saw the incumbent, Joaquίn Balaguer, returned to the post he has held for so long, defeating his principal challenger, José Francisco Peña Gόmez, by a margin of 22,281 votes. The most recent election, on 16 May 1994, proved to be just as traumatic and incident-prone as those that preceded it, dating back to the first democratic election in 1978. Unlike the last election (in 1990), however, in which Balaguer also won a narrow victory, this time the charges of electoral fraud were well-documented and the accuracy of the tally widely disbelieved, not just domestically but internationally as well.

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