Abstract
Voters hold governments to account through elections, but which criteria are most important to voter evaluations of incumbent performance? While (economic) outcomes have long been central to studies of retrospective voting, recent studies have considered the influence of policy output—the policies implemented by incumbents to achieve their goals. Building on this promising development, this study identifies three ways in which policy output is expected to affect voter evaluations of incumbent performance—the congruence between implemented policy and (1) individual preferences; (2) public opinion; and (3) election pledges. A discrete choice experiment was designed to assess the relative importance of these three aspects of policy output in comparison to each other; as well as to two important economic indicators. Overall, the findings support the notion that policy output matters to voters even beyond outcomes. The findings also show that voters value congruence between policy and their personal preferences considerably more than policy congruence with public opinion; and election pledge fulfillment. This indicates that voters are egotropic in their evaluation of implemented policy, and more policy-seeking than accounted for in much of the empirical retrospective voting literature. These results inform our understanding of how policy output matters to voters, as well as of how voters hold governments accountable for their performance.
Highlights
A central principle in most conceptions of representative democracy is that voters hold governments accountable through elections
While attention for the effects of policy output is on the rise in studies of retrospective voting, no comprehensive account has -far reconciled the various ways in which policy output may affect incumbent evaluations—nor has the relative importance of policy output for incumbent evaluations been explicitly compared to that of economic outcomes
Good performance on all included evaluation criteria is associated with better voter evaluations of government performance, while poor performance is associated with worse evaluations
Summary
A central principle in most conceptions of representative democracy is that voters hold governments accountable through elections. Therewith, the findings of this study inform the literatures that address the relevance of various aspects of policy output, such as policy congruence with majority preferences and election pledge fulfillment, to voters; as well as the wider literature that seeks to understand how voters hold incumbents accountable for past performance. After a brief discussion of the central premise of retrospective voting, the findings from previous work on voter evaluations of incumbent performance are discussed This discussion provides the foundation for the theoretical argument of this study, that policy output should matter to voters in three important ways; through its congruence with individual voter preferences; public opinion; and election pledges, leading up to the specific questions addressed in the experiment of this paper. Expanding on the classic insights on retrospective voting (e.g., Key and Cummings 1966; Kramer 1971; Fair 1978; Fiorina 1981), it has been argued that retrospective voting allows voters to sanction poor performing incumbents (Ferejohn 1986) and select future leaders that have proven themselves to govern in a competent and honest manner; while removing from office those that have exhibited the opposite
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