The Successor Factor

Abstract

Do voters sanction incumbent parties collectively for the performance of the government, or do they hold politicians accountable individually? Most economic voting studies assume that voters hold the incumbent party collectively accountable and that candidate-specific factors do not have an independent effect on how voters punish and reward incumbents. This article argues that voters weigh the past executive’s performance differently, depending on the degree to which the presidential candidate is identified with the performance of the government. It differentiates between presidents running for re-election, successors—political allies of the outgoing president—and non-successors—party-internal opponents of the president. The article shows that re-running presidents are held more accountable than the other two and that successors are subject to greater electoral sanctioning than non-successors. Empirically, the article estimates multi-level models on an original data set that combines information on candidate types with individual-level observations from 51 election years in Latin America.