Curbing Electoral Corruption: Two South Asian Civil Society Efforts to Build Robust Democracies

In this chapter, I present two civil society initiatives which deal with one particular sectoral corruption, i.e. elections, whose goal is to empower people by furnishing information about elections (candidates, political party funding and electoral laws) so that citizens can make informed choices while selecting their representatives. These two initiatives are the Association for Democratic Reforms in India and Shujan (Citizens for Good Governance) in Bangladesh. Borrowing the word ‘infomediaries’, a portmanteau of information intermediaries from Fattah (2016), I argue that the two initiatives are instances of infomediaries in the South Asian context which intend to monitor election-related data as well as influence policymaking in the electoral arena, thereby aiding to mechanisms for horizontal accountability in places where vertical accountability is weak.