Political information and retrospective voting

Abstract

This study aims to provide a comprehensive view of the role of political information in retrospective voting by simultaneously investigating the effects of levels of information on the individual level and the availability of information on the contextual level. It is argued that the sophistication-gap in retrospective voting is confined to those contexts in which it is hard for voters to assign responsibility for the country’s state of affairs to the correct political party/-ies. Contrary to this expectation, analyses using the CSES data show that there is a larger difference in retrospective voting between voters with different levels of political information in high-clarity contexts, while voters do not seem to hold incumbent parties to account at the polls in low-clarity contexts – irrespective of their level of political knowledge. However, additional analyses show variation in this result depending on the data and measures used.