Good riddance to bad government? Institutional performance voting in Swedish municipalities

Rasmus Broms

doi:10.1017/s0143814x21000076

Abstract

AbstractElectoral accountability is widely considered to be an essential component for maintaining the quality of a polity’s institutions. Nevertheless, a growing body of research has found weak or limited support for the notion that voters punish political corruption, a central but partial aspect of institutional quality. In order to capture the full range of institutional dysfunction an electorate should be incentivised to punish, I further the concept of institutional performance voting, that is, voting on institutional quality as a whole. Using a novel data set on performance audit reports in Swedish municipalities between 2003 and 2014, I find that audit critique is associated with a statistically significant but substantively moderate electoral loss of about a percentage point for mayoral parties, while simultaneously associated with a 14 percentage point decrease in their probability of reelection.

Highlights

Do voters retrospectively punish politicians responsible for bad institutions? Considering a plethora of evidence that incumbents serve at the mercy of factors partially or wholly out of their control – “from the state of the market to the weather, the performance of sports teams, and shark attacks (Achen and Bartels 2013 [but cf. Fowler and Hall 2018]; Healy et al 2010; Gasper and Reeves 2011; Miller 2013)” – it stands to reason that they should be evaluated on the actual performance of the governments they run, and the institutions whose quality they are tasked with upholding.existing research has far only provided limited answers to this critical question
Apart from the literature on economic voting, which indirectly deals with institutional performance (Kramer 1983; see Healy and Malhotra 2013 for a review), the most approximate body of evidence comes from an emerging literature showing that political corruption scandals moderately and contingently diminish politicians’ electoral prospects
This study has contributed to the state of knowledge on how two central concepts in modern political science, institutional quality and electoral accountability, interrelate

Summary

Introduction

Do voters retrospectively punish politicians responsible for bad institutions? Considering a plethora of evidence that incumbents serve at the mercy of factors partially or wholly out of their control – “from the state of the market to the weather, the performance of sports teams, and shark attacks (Achen and Bartels 2013 [but cf. Fowler and Hall 2018]; Healy et al 2010; Gasper and Reeves 2011; Miller 2013)” – it stands to reason that they should be evaluated on the actual performance of the governments they run, and the institutions whose quality they are tasked with upholding.existing research has far only provided limited answers to this critical question. To further press the notion that the observed dynamic of audit critique and electoral punishment really is connected to the greater concept of institutional quality and not some other idiosyncratic and unmeasured aspects of audit critique, I exchanged the critique measure for three alternate indices of institutional quality (see Section A in the supplementary material): (a) a survey item about the Quality of application of laws and rules, derived from an annual survey of local businesspeople by the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (2017),8 (b) a Quality of Government-index (Dahlström and Sundell, 2013; Karlsson and Gilljam, 2014) capturing municipal politicians’ perceptions of the extent of bribery, partiality, and meritocratic recruitment in their respective govenments, and (c) a composite index of top municipal politicians’ and bureaucrats’ perceptions of Corruption in seven administrative spheres drawn from a 2011 survey by the Swedish Agency for Public Management (2012).

Results

Conclusion