Electoral Accountability Research Articles

Does Partisanship Hurt Electoral Accountability? Individual-Level and Aggregate-Level Comparisons of Western and Postcommunist Democracies

While the negative effect of partisanship on electoral accountability has been assumed in established Western democracies, its empirical test has been rare, especially for postcommunist democracies whose democratization processes are so distinct that their partisanship might deliver different political impacts from their Western counterparts. Through individual- and aggregate-level regressions, I find that partisanship, in general, does hurt electoral accountability at both levels. From a comparative perspective, the individual-level tests reveal that such a negative effect of partisanship has been more salient among the postcommunist voters with fewer electoral resources to rely on than among the Western voters whose abilities to hold the government accountable are stronger. At the aggregate level, however, this tendency becomes reversed as any increase in partisanship beyond its current relatively high level may induce the over-institutionalization of the Western party systems restricting electoral accountability, while it could rather help to stabilize the postcommunist party systems making it easier for voters to discern which political group is accountable for policy outcomes.

Facing up to the facts: What causes economic perceptions?

The link between individual perceptions of the economy and vote choice is fundamental to electoral accountability. Yet, while it is well-established that economic perceptions are correlated with voting behaviour, it is unclear whether these perceptions are rooted in the real economy or whether they simply reflect voters’ partisan biases. This article uses time-series data, survey data and unique experimental evidence to shed new light on how British voters update their economic perceptions in response to economic change. Our findings demonstrate that while partisanship influences levels of economic optimism, people respond to information about real economic changes by adjusting their economic perceptions.

A Tale of Three Cities: Electoral Accountability in Indonesian Local Politics

ABSTRACTIn Indonesia, local government is endowed with important policy prerogatives and local politics is key to advance social welfare. The literature on Indonesian local politics has convincingly exposed serious limitations in local democratic practices, and it has questioned the ability of local democracy to promote genuine political change. This work, however, predominantly focuses on elite politics and specific forms of accountability based on patronage and clientelism. In this paper, we study democratic accountability in Indonesia from a different perspective. Drawing from the comparative literature on voting behavior, we hypothesize that Indonesian voters evaluate local politicians for their performance, and that they vote to reward or punish them for what they do in office. The analysis of three original surveys conducted in the cities of Medan, Samarinda and Surabaya offers partial support for this argument. While there is a positive relationship between evaluations of local government performance and support for incumbents, the strength of this link varies substantially across individuals and cities. The results shed new light on voter-politician linkages in Indonesia, suggesting that forms of accountability different from clientelism may emerge in this large and diverse country.

Democracy Aid and Electoral Accountability

Although foreign policies often fail to successfully promote democracy, over a decade of empirical research indicates that foreign aid specifically for democracy promotion is remarkably successful at improving the survival and institutional strength of fragile democracies. However, these measures cannot tell us how well democracy aid supports the central promise of democracy: accountable government. Since institutions can be subverted in various ways that undermine accountability, it is vital to know whether democracy aid supports accountability to assess its overall success. We provide evidence for this by analyzing incumbent turnover in elections, following poor economic performance—the economic vote—as a measure of voting to achieve performance accountability. In our analysis of over 1,100 elections in 114 developing countries between 1975 and 2010, we find distinct evidence that increasing receipt of democracy aid is associated with more economic voting. Results are robust to numerous alternative empirical specifications.

Executive Constraint, Political Stability, and Economic Growth

Previous studies have argued that democracy diminishes the extent to which leadership contests depress economic growth, by reducing the violence and uncertainty attendant on such contests. We reconsider the theoretical basis for this claim, highlighting the separate roles of executive constraint and electoral accountability. Exploiting panel data from 1850 to 2005, we show that the executive’s horizontal accountability to the legislature significantly moderates the economic downturns associated with leadership turnover, while its vertical accountability to the electorate does not. These results suggest that, in terms of moderating succession-related downturns and thereby promoting steadier economic growth, the health of legislatures is more important than the health of elections.

Safeguarding Democracy: Powersharing and Democratic Survival

Democracy is often fragile, especially in states recovering from civil conflict. To protect emerging democracies, many scholars and practitioners recommend political powersharing institutions, which aim to safeguard minority group interests. Yet there is little empirical research on whether powersharing promotes democratic survival, and some concern that it limits electoral accountability. To fill this gap, we differentiate between inclusive, dispersive, and constraining powersharing institutions and analyze their effects on democratic survival from 1975 to 2015 using a global dataset. We find sharp distinctions across types of powersharing and political context. Inclusive powersharing, such as ethnic quotas, promotes democratic survival only in post-conflict settings. In contrast, dispersive institutions such as federalism tend to destabilize post-conflict democracies. Only constraining powersharing consistently facilitates democratic survival regardless of recent conflict. Institution-builders and international organizations should therefore prioritize institutions that constrain leaders, including independent judiciaries, civilian control of the armed forces, and constitutional protections of individual and group rights.

How the Unorganized Mass Public (Sometimes) Gets Represented in Regulatory Politics

Many scholars have argued that because consumers are poorly organized, regulatory enforcement will tend to be lax and serve the interests of industry. Considering, however, that elections are one of the main mechanisms by which the public exerts control over policy, surprisingly few studies have examined how electoral incentives may spur the government to regulate vigorously on behalf of consumers. We argue that when the threat of electoral accountability is greater, regulatory activities will serve the interests of the public, even if they impose costs on industry. We test this theoretical expectation by analyzing state regulatory activity in the wake of exogenous storms and natural disasters, which provide us with important theoretical and causal leverage. We find that a more “pro-regulation” electorate and elected chief regulators acting in close proximity to elections are associated with pro-consumer regulatory action.

Political Conditions for Electoral Accountability in Federalism

AbstractA theory of voting under federalism requires that attributions of responsibility moderate the strength of retrospective voting. Scholars have spotty evidence that voters do this but put this down to the effects of institutions and citizens’ capabilities. I show thatpoliticalvariation also affects electoral accountability. Using panel surveys across provincial and federal elections and qualitative media content analysis, I show that voters only live up to a federal theory of voting when governments make policy changes independent of the other level and those changes and their consequences are prominent in political discourse. Federal institutions affect electoral accountability through the politics that they generate.

Ideology and Vote Choice in U.S. Mayoral Elections: Evidence from Facebook Surveys

City elections in the U.S. are widely thought to be low-information contests decided by non-ideological factors. This consensus casts doubt on the possibility of electoral accountability in cities, and renders recent evidence of municipal responsiveness puzzling. However, our knowledge of how voters actually behave in local elections is severely limited by a lack of individual-level survey data collected from local contests. Using three such original surveys, I re-examine the role of ideology in mayoral elections, recruiting samples of local voters via geotargeted Facebook advertisements. In two large cities, I find ideology is a powerful and independent predictor of vote choice. Using a panel design, I find voters learn the relative ideological positions of candidates over the course of a campaign, and that learning causally impacts vote choice. The effect of ideology also replicates in a conjoint experiment fielded to a sample of small-city voters in another region. Electoral accountability is thus a plausible explanation for ideological responsiveness in U.S. cities, and the methodological tools introduced here can now be applied to a variety of questions about local voter behavior.

Electoral Accountability for State Legislative Roll Calls and Ideological Representation

Theories of electoral accountability predict that legislators will receive fewer votes if they fail to represent their districts. To determine whether this prediction applies to state legislators, I conduct two analyses that evaluate the extent to which voters sanction legislators who cast unpopular roll-call votes or provide poor ideological representation. Neither analysis, however, produces compelling evidence that elections hold most state legislators accountable. I discover that legislators do not face meaningful electoral consequences for their ideological representation, particularly in areas where legislators receive less media attention, have larger staffs, and represent more partisan districts. In a study of individual roll-call votes across 11 states, I furthermore find a weak relationship between legislators’ roll-call positions and election outcomes with voters rewarding or punishing legislators for only 4 of 30 examined roll calls. Thus, while state legislators wield considerable policymaking power, elections do not appear to hold many legislators accountable for their lawmaking.

Insider or Outsider? Grand Corruption and Electoral Accountability

While democratic accountability is widely expected to reduce corruption, citizens to a surprisingly large extent opt to forgo their right to protest and voice complaints, and refrain from using their electoral right to punish corrupt politicians. This article examines how grand corruption and elite collusion influence electoral accountability, in particular citizens’ willingness to punish corrupt incumbents. Using new regional-level data across 21 European countries, we provide clear empirical evidence that the level of societal grand corruption in which a voter finds herself systematically affects how she responds to a political corruption scandal. Grand corruption increases loyalty to corrupt politicians, demobilizes the citizenry, and crafts a deep divide between insiders, or potential beneficiaries of the system, and outsiders, left on the sidelines of the distribution of benefits. This explains why outsiders fail to channel their discontent into effective electoral punishment, and thereby how corruption undermines democratic accountability.

Presidents, Assembly Dissolution, and the Electoral Performance of Prime Ministers

Many European presidents have extensive constitutional powers to affect the timing of early parliamentary elections, which enables them to influence when incumbent governments must face the electorate. This article examines whether presidents use their assembly dissolution powers for partisan benefit. To date, presidential activism in the electoral arena of parliamentary and semipresidential democracies remains poorly understood. We hypothesize that presidents use their powers to influence election calling for the advantage of their political allies in government. To test this argument, we use data on 190 elections in 18 European democracies. Our results suggest that presidents with significant dissolution powers are able to shape the electoral success of incumbents. Prime ministers whose governments are allied to such presidents realize a vote and seat share bonus of around 5%. These findings have implications for our understanding of presidential activism, strategic parliamentary dissolution, and electoral accountability.

Elections and Embezzlement

This paper tests if democratic elections can reduce the embezzlement of public resources through mechanisms other than electoral accountability. In a field-based behavioral experiment with 472 groups of citizens in Burkina Faso, it is varied whether decision makers are elected or not, without changing citizens' ability to sanction them. The experiment shows that elections facilitate the selection of benevolent decision makers and lower citizens' tolerance for embezzlement. However, elections also bias citizens' expectations, causing them to underestimate rent extraction and to trust decision makers more than they should. Information about the true extent of embezzlement enhances the effect of elections, because it corrects this perceptive bias.

Folk Theories, Dynamic Pluralism, and Democratic Values

Abstract constitutional values often motivate separation of powers doctrine and doctrines in other areas of law. A jurist favors one doctrinal position over another because, under some implicit positive theory, it promotes a consequential value: for example, abstract liberty, rule of law, or democratic values. Yet this jurisprudential posture falters if theory is incomplete or inapt. As an object lesson into the perils of incomplete functionalism, I consider the relationship between the so-called unitary executive and democratic values. I first formalize a theoretical account of the unitary executive along the lines of the one that animates judicial decisions; I then show that, viewed in a more complete setting, judicial decisions seemingly promoting a unitary executive may engender pluralism and undermine the value of accountability. I empirically examine the relationship between electoral accountability and innovations relating to one such offensive institution -- the legislative veto -- in the context of the American states between 1950-2010. I find that the offending institution of the legislative veto is, if anything, associated with stronger, not weaker, executive accountability for administrative actions, questioning the soundness of democratic values as a motivation for pursuing a unitary executive. I conclude with thoughts on the role of courts in managing functionalist constitutional values.

Congressional Candidates in the Era of Party Ballots

Our article investigates the role of congressional candidates during the era of party ballots in nineteenth-century congressional elections. We examine how these candidates contributed to the overall quality of the party ballot and the means by which nationalization of elections served to mitigate candidate attributes. In our analysis, we take advantage of two unique features of elections during this era. First, election timing was quite variable before 1872, as many House races were not held concurrently with presidential elections. Second, House candidates’ position on the ballot varied depending on whether a presidential or gubernatorial race was also being contested at the same time. To investigate these factors, we examine House elections prior to the adoption of the Australian ballot and find strong evidence of candidate effects during this period. Our findings raise important implications about candidate influence and electoral accountability in a more party-centered era.

Migration outflows and optimal migration policy: rules versus discretion

We study the effects of more open borders on return migration and show that migrants are more likely to return to the origin country when migration rules are softened, because this implies that they could more easily re-migrate if return migration is unsuccessful. As a result, softening migration rules leads to lower net inflows than is generally acknowledged. We show that if government follows rules to shape the optimal migration policy, it will choose more open “borders” than were its behaviour to be discretionary. However, this requires an appropriate commitment technology. We show that electoral accountability may be a solution to the commitment problem. As a matter of fact, observed softer immigration rules in western countries suggest the effectiveness of such a mechanism.

Democracy and Representation in Paraguay

This article reviews the electoral accountability dimension as a constitutive mechanism of Paraguayan democracy since 1989, analyzing the factors that limit the representation contained in the administration of the Paraguayan government as a result of the electoral process. We provide an analytic contrast between the democratic principles that guide the Paraguayan electoral institutions and the way their designs are enforced, identifying the gap between formal and informal rules as determinants of political representation. We also describe the barriers that prevent effective access of the population to political participation and competition, the advantages possessed by traditional political parties and interest groups, as well as their implications for democracy. We also review the degree to which elected officials are representative of historically excluded social groups as a result, emphasizing the way women, indigenous and peasant communities have potentially limited power to exercise political influence due to limitations to participation by structural and institutional factors.

Women’s Representation, Accountability and Corruption in Democracies

At the turn of the twenty-first century, an important pair of studies established that greater female representation in government is associated with lower levels of perceived corruption in that government. But recent research finds that this relationship is not universal and questions why it exists. This article presents a new theory explaining why women’s representation is only sometimes related to lower corruption levels and provides evidence in support of that theory. The study finds that the women’s representation–corruption link is strongest when the risk of corruption being detected and punished by voters is high – in other words, when officials can be held electorally accountable. Two primary mechanisms underlie this theory: prior evidence shows that (1) women are more risk-averse than men and (2) voters hold women to a higher standard at the polls. This suggests that gender differences in corrupt behavior are proportional to the strength of electoral accountability. Consequently, the hypotheses predict that the empirical relationship between greater women’s representation and lower perceived corruption will be strongest in democracies with high electoral accountability, specifically: (1) where corruption is not the norm, (2) where press freedom is respected, (3) in parliamentary systems and (4) under personalistic electoral rules. The article presents observational evidence that electoral accountability moderates the link between women’s representation and corruption in a time-series, cross-sectional dataset of seventy-six democratic-leaning countries.

Which U.S. House Members Present Their Legislative Records? Models of Electoral Accountability and the Content of Press Releases

This article tests competing theories of legislators' understanding of electoral accountability by examining which members of the House of Representatives convey their legislative records to the public most frequently. Using data derived from lawmakers' descriptions of their floor votes and other legislative activity in more than 50,000 press releases issued during 2010 and 2012, I detect some behavior consistent with representatives' beliefs that voters assess their policy positions without a party frame. Members whose record is incongruous with their constituents' policy preferences tend to avoid mentions of their personal legislative behavior, for example. For the most part, however, the article provides strong evidence that members subscribe to a partisan model and particularly a version in which voters care appreciably more about the actions of the majority than the minority.

Electoral Accountability in the Midst of Criminal Violence: Evidence from Mexico

AbstractRising levels of crime and insecurity affect the quality of life. A fundamental question for the prospects of democracy is whether voters, in hopes of reaching better solutions to conditions of prevailing insecurity, can hold their elected officials accountable for such situations. This article argues that electoral accountability amid criminal violence requires voters to be able to assign responsibility for crime, and that partisan alignment across levels of government facilitates this task. Recent Mexican elections are examined to test this argument. Relying on both aggregate electoral data and individual survey evidence, this study shows that voters hold politicians accountable for crime in the narrow circumstances of organized crime–related violence and political alignment. This evidence not only provides additional caveats to issue voting models, but also opens new avenues of research on electoral accountability.