Electoral Accountability Research Articles

Term limits and electoral accountability

Periodic elections are the main instrument through which voters can hold politicians accountable. From this perspective term limits, which restrict voters' ability to reward politicians with re-election, appear counterproductive. We show that despite the disciplining effect of elections, term limits can be ex-ante welfare improving from the perspective of voters. By reducing the value of holding office, term limits can induce politicians to implement policies that are closer to their private preferences. Such “truthful” behavior by incumbents in turn results in better screening of incumbents. We characterize under which circumstances two-term or even longer term limits are the optimal institution for voters.

Retrospective Economic Voting and the Intertemporal Dynamics of Electoral Accountability in the American States

Are politicians' policymaking reputations durable according to the judgment of voters? A theory of intertemporal attribution discounting is advanced for purposes of explaining how voters apply heterogeneous sanctions and rewards for a non-incumbent candidate’s prior economic stewardship in elective office. Aggregate electoral data on ex-governors in the American states uncovers strong empirical evidence of intertemporal attribution discounting behavior. Voters using prior economic stewardship over entire tenure in office for ex-governors form the strongest initial retrospective economic attributions, but also intertemporally discount ex-governors seeking future elective office at a higher rate than compared to when their retrospective evaluations are restricted to either the last term or final year in office. This study demonstrates that reputational slippage transpires with the passage of time between prior elective office and returning to the electoral arena, whereby voters experience increasing difficulty when it comes to rewarding competent experienced politicians, as well as sanctioning incompetent counterparts.

Voter Behavior and Seniority Advantage in Pork Barrel Politics

This paper explores electoral accountability in a legislative system that favors seniority using laboratory experiments. Voters face a trade-off between pork barrel transfers and policy representation. The experiment tests term limits as a mechanism to reduce the cost of searching for a candidate who better represents voters on policy, as well as reducing the resulting asymmetric distribution of income. I use subjects’ preferences on abortion to capture incumbents’ policy choices where subjects vote to determine whether a donation is allocated to either a pro-choice or pro-life non-profit group to create tension between visceral and monetary influences on voter behavior.

ELECTORAL SYSTEMS AND CONGRESSIONAL MALFEASANCE: COMPARING BRAZILIAN SENATORS AND DEPUTIES IN THE SUPREME COURT CASES

This article contributes to our understanding of therelationship between electoral systems and legislative malfeasance byexamining personal vote, district magnitude, and electoral accountability.Studies emphasizing individual responsibility argue that personal-voteelectoral systems promote good performance by elected politicians andconstrain their malfeasance by enabling voters to identify, monitor, andhold responsible individual politicians. Another strand of the literatureclaims that large district magnitude ensures the availability of goodpoliticians and electoral competition, which reduce malfeasance. Atfirst glance, personal-vote systems with relatively large magnitudedistricts, such as open-list proportional representation, appear to combinethe beneficial attributes of the electoral systems that prior studies haveshown to lower malfeasance. This study develops a proposition thatdue to high information costs to voters faced with many candidates,multimember-district personal-vote systems may weaken, rather thanstrengthen, electoral accountability. Thus, the combination of personalvotes and large district magnitude can paradoxically encourage the entryof bad politicians, facilitate their elections, and fail to deter them frommisconduct once elected into office. Examining data on congressionalmalfeasance in Brazil, this study finds that deputies, who are electedthrough relatively large magnitude open-list PR, are more likely toreceive court notices about the charges against them than senatorselected by plurality rule.

ELECTORAL SYSTEMS AND CONGRESSIONAL MALFEASANCE: COMPARING BRAZILIAN SENATORS AND DEPUTIES IN THE SUPREME COURT CASES

This article contributes to our understanding of therelationship between electoral systems and legislative malfeasance byexamining personal vote, district magnitude, and electoral accountability.Studies emphasizing individual responsibility argue that personal-voteelectoral systems promote good performance by elected politicians andconstrain their malfeasance by enabling voters to identify, monitor, andhold responsible individual politicians. Another strand of the literatureclaims that large district magnitude ensures the availability of goodpoliticians and electoral competition, which reduce malfeasance. Atfirst glance, personal-vote systems with relatively large magnitudedistricts, such as open-list proportional representation, appear to combinethe beneficial attributes of the electoral systems that prior studies haveshown to lower malfeasance. This study develops a proposition thatdue to high information costs to voters faced with many candidates,multimember-district personal-vote systems may weaken, rather thanstrengthen, electoral accountability. Thus, the combination of personalvotes and large district magnitude can paradoxically encourage the entryof bad politicians, facilitate their elections, and fail to deter them frommisconduct once elected into office. Examining data on congressionalmalfeasance in Brazil, this study finds that deputies, who are electedthrough relatively large magnitude open-list PR, are more likely toreceive court notices about the charges against them than senatorselected by plurality rule.

FIGHTING CORRUPTION WITH SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY MECHANISMS' POTENTIAL TO REDUCE CORRUPTION IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

SUMMARYGiven the poor track record of traditional anti‐corruption initiatives, donors and governments are increasingly looking at how civil society can fight corruption in public administration. Social accountability mechanisms intend to perform this role by holding officials directly accountable through citizen engagement. However, this article argues that social accountability mechanisms are only capable of reducing corruption systemically if they activate horizontal accountability and sustain it through the sanctioning mechanisms of electoral accountability. A comparative case study analysis using the cases of the Ugandan Public Expenditure Tracking Survey and the Bangalore Citizen Report Card is applied to test this hypothesis. The Tanzanian Public Expenditure Tracking Survey and an example of citizen engagement in Mumbai are employed as shadow cases to provide additional evidence for the hypothesis. The results indicate that social accountability mechanisms must be inclusive, broad, with public effect and embedded in other accountability relationships to fight corruption effectively. Electoral accountability is key, and support to social accountability mechanisms should therefore always be well placed within a broader agenda aimed at strengthening democratic governance. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

When do Economic Perceptions Matter for Party Approval?

Do economic perceptions influence partisan preferences or vice versa? We argue that the direction of influence between government approval and economic perceptions is conditional on the state of the economy. Under conditions of economic crisis, when economic signals are relatively unambiguous, perceptions of the economy can be expected to exogenously influence government approval but this is not found when the economy is experiencing a more typical pattern of moderate growth and economic signals are more mixed. We test these arguments using British election panel surveys covering electoral cycles of moderate economic growth (1997–2001) and dramatic and negative disruption (2005–2010). We examine the most commonly employed measures of retrospective economic perceptions and estimate a range of models using structural equations modelling. We demonstrate that when the economy is performing extremely badly economic perceptions have an exogenous effect on government approval and provide a means of electoral accountability, but this is not the case in under more normal circumstances.

Sharing the Blame? Local Electoral Accountability and Centralized School Finance in California

Although local electoral accountability should be stronger when responsibilities are clearly assigned to local governments, the involvement of higher tiers of government is often associated with policies specifically designed to improve local accountability. This article investigates the impact of centralization on local electoral accountability in the context of California's school finance system. Results show that voters are responsive to differences in dropout rates and pupil–teacher ratios, at least in some contexts, and that local electoral accountability is affected by a district's degree of centralization. Dropout rate regressions reveal that the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 appears to have sharpened local electoral accountability.

Electoral accountability in the developing world

Do citizens of the developing world behave as economic voters? Do they blame and reward incumbent governments for their perceived economic performance? In addressing these questions, the current paper fills an important void left by the extant literature by adopting a large-n approach with the use of public opinion survey data and by focusing on emerging democracies of the developing world. The proposed analysis develops a series of incumbent support models to assess the impact of economic assessments. It relies on the use of public opinion survey data from countries of Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and East Asia, and the Arab world. The paper contributes to the extant literature at the empirical, methodological, and theoretical levels. Empirically, it provides a unique and systematic account of the phenomenon through a large-scale comparative approach. Theoretically, it contributes to the debate on the value of economic voting to explain electoral behavior in the developing world. Methodologically, it shows that using presidential approval is a fair alternative to vote choice and that a full model specification is not absolutely necessary to estimating the economic effect.

Uncertainty, Electoral Incentives and Political Myopia

We study the determinants of political myopia in a rational model of electoral accountability with informational frictions and uncertainty. When politicians' ability is ex ante unknown and policy choices are unobservable, elections improve political accountability and selection. However, incumbents underinvest in costly policies with future returns to signal high ability and increase re-election probability. Surprisingly, uncertainty reduces political myopia and may increase social welfare. We also address the socially optimal political rewards and the desirability of a one-term limit. Our predictions are consistent with several stylised facts and with a new empirical observation: aggregate uncertainty is positively correlated with fiscal discipline.

Candidates, Credibility, and Re-election Incentives

I study elections between citizen-candidates who cannot make binding policy commitments before taking office, but who are accountable to voters due to the possibility of re-election. In each period a representative voter chooses among heterogeneous candidates with known policy preferences. The elected candidate chooses the policy to implement, and how much rent-seeking to engage in, when in office. As the voter decides both which candidate to elect and, subsequently, whether the candidate is retained, this framework integrates elements of electoral competition and electoral accountability. I show that, in the best stationary equilibrium, when utility functions are concave over policy, non-median candidates are elected over candidates with policy preferences more closely aligned with the voter. In this equilibrium, there are two candidates who are elected at some history, and the policies these candidates implement in office do not converge. This divergence incentivizes candidates to engage in less rent-seeking, increasing voter welfare.

Learning to Love Democracy: Electoral Accountability and the Success of Democracy

This article explains why dissatisfaction with the performance of individual politicians in new democracies often turns into disillusionment with democracy as a political system. The demands on elections as an instrument of political accountability are much greater in new than established democracies: politicians have yet to form reputations, a condition that facilitates the entry into politics of undesirable candidates who view this period as their “one‐time opportunity to get rich.” After a repeatedly disappointing government performance, voters may rationally conclude that “all politicians are crooks” and stop discriminating among them, to which all politicians rationally respond by “acting like crooks,” even if most may be willing to perform well in office if given appropriate incentives. Such an expectation‐driven failure of accountability, which I call the “trap of pessimistic expectations,” may precipitate the breakdown of democracy. Once politicians establish reputations for good performance, however, these act as barriers to the entry into politics of low‐quality politicians. The resulting improvement in government performance reinforces voters’ belief that democracy can deliver accountability, a process that I associate with democratic consolidation. These arguments provide theoretical microfoundations for several prominent empirical associations between the economic performance of new democracies, public attitudes toward democracy, and democratic stability.

Does The (Largely Unknown) Administrative Law Process Protect Or Abuse Citizens Rights?

Administrative law consists generally of the rules, orders, and decisions of federal, state, and local government agencies established to perform a specific function.The Administrative Procedure Act, other legislation, and court decisions have established administrative agencies as a large power base, largely insulated from electoral accountability, at both the federal and state levels.Most citizens are unaware of the extent of such power, and of the extent such power can be exercised with minimal transparency. This paper reviews and evaluates the federal administrative law process, examines differing practices followed in various states and foreign countries, and suggests potential changes to make the process more accountable and transparent, and to preserve better the rights of parties to both procedural and substantive due process.

Political stability, corruption and trust in politicians

In this article we develop a dynamic model where an endogenous evolution of trust impacts a politician's choice for bribe-taking and tax re-distribution. The politician obtains utility from net income that comes from his wage income, tax embezzlements and bribe-taking, and he also has incentives for tax re-distribution. The higher the tax embezzlements and the more bribes the politician takes the lower his citizens' trust and the less likely will he be re-elected. We support the evolution of trust with an econometric investigation.We analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions, and find that withholding taxes and taking bribes may be complements or substitutes for a politician, depending on the politician's incentives for tax re-distribution. Without these incentives, tax embezzlement and bribe taking are necessarily substitutes. With sufficiently strong incentives, we find re-distribution and bribe-taking may become complements. Complements implies that the politician, at least partly, increases bribe-taking because this allows him to increase re-distribution, which aids his additional motives for tax re-distribution.Based on comparative statics at steady state we also find that the higher the politician's wage the lower the bribe-taking and the higher the trust; stronger social capital leads to less bribe-taking and higher levels of trust; improvements in electoral accountability induce a decrease in bribing while trust increases.

Reforming India's Institutions of Public Expenditure Governance

The poor quality and effectiveness of much of government expenditure in India makes it important to analyze ways of improving effectiveness through institutional reform. Improvements in outcomes include better targeting of redistributive measures and more efficient spending on productive projects. Four potential areas of institutional reform are: (1) improved functioning of individual ministries and departments, at the central and state levels; (2) better coordination across individual ministries and between the center and states, through reform of the Planning Commission; (3) reassignment of expenditure responsibilities across levels of government (center to state and/or state to local); and (4) reassignment of tax authorities to provide improved incentives for expenditure governance through electoral accountability. The paper will discuss each of these four areas of potential institutional reforms, their likely impacts, and possibilities for implementing change.

Mexico’s 2012 Elections: The Return of the PRI

With Mexico seeming poised for a change election in 2012, why did it vote in a regime that ruled the country for much of the 20th century? Is the new PRI different from the old PRI? What are the implications of the PRI’s return for Mexico’s democracy? This article argues that several institutions on which the old regime was based remained intact after the transition, which made the return of the PRI almost inevitable. It suggests that the PRI's return is a mixed blessing for Mexican democracy. On the one hand, the peaceful turnover of power among all parties is a welcome sign that democracy is maturing. Political parties should have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes—a sign that electoral accountability may be working. On the other hand, however, the return of the PRI is likely to reinvigorate several features of the old regime that remained unscathed by the country’s democratic transition, potentially representing a setback for Mexico's young democracy.

Does Electoral Accountability Make a Difference? Direct Elections, Career Ambition, and Legislative Performance in the Argentine Senate

Studies analyzing the American Congress demonstrate that senators’ attention towards voters substantially increased after the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which replaced their indirect appointment with direct election. Even though this finding seems useful for theoretical generalizations, expectations become unclear as concerns about career perspectives differ. Should politicians with nonstatic ambition shift their attention towards voters if they do not expect reelection? Making use of a quasi-experimental setting, I analyze the impact of the shift from indirect to direct election to select the members of the Argentine Senate. I develop an argument for why, in spite of the lack of systematic pursuit of reelection, elected senators have incentives to be more oriented towards voters. Through the analysis of about 55,000 bills, I evaluate senatorial behavior under both sources of legitimacy. The findings support the idea that audience costs make a difference in behavior, regardless of short-term career expectations.

Tobacco Politics and Electoral Accountability in the United States

This article investigates whether reputation-building strategies may guide US governors’ state cigarette tax choices and whether the federal cigarette tax influences such behavior. Using 1975–2000 data, we find evidence indicating that governors are prone to engage in reputation building, in particular in states with relatively important agricultural tobacco production. Moreover, lame ducks are more prone to raise the state cigarette tax the lower the federal tax.

Benchmarking across Borders: Electoral Accountability and the Necessity of Comparison

When the economy in a single country contracts, voters often punish the government. When many economies contract, voters turn against their governments much less frequently. This suggests that the international context matters for the domestic vote, yet most research on electoral accountability assumes that voters treat their national economies as autarkic. We decompose two key economic aggregates—growth in real gross domestic product and unemployment—into their international and domestic components and demonstrate that voters hold incumbents more electorally accountable for the domestic than for the international component of growth. Voters in a wide variety of democracies benchmark national economic growth against that abroad, punishing (rewarding) incumbents for national outcomes that underperform (outperform) an international comparison. Tests suggest that this effect arises not from highly informed voters making direct comparisons but from “pre-benchmarking” by the media when reporting on the economy. The effect of benchmarked growth exceeds that of aggregate national growth by up to a factor of two and outstrips the international component of growth by an even larger margin, implying that previous research may have underestimated the strength of the economy on the vote.

Representative misconduct, voter perceptions and accountability: Evidence from the 2009 House of Commons expenses scandal

This paper examines electoral accountability after the 2009–10 UK expenses scandal. Existing research shows that Members of Parliament (MPs) implicated in the scandal fared only marginally worse in the election than non-implicated colleagues. This lack of electoral accountability for misconduct could have arisen either because voters did not know about their representative's wrongdoing or because they chose not to electorally sanction them. We combine panel survey data with new measures of MP implication in the expenses scandal to test where electoral accountability failed. We find that MP implication influenced voter perceptions of wrongdoing more than expected. In contrast, constituents were only marginally less likely to vote for MPs who were implicated in the scandal. Electoral accountability may therefore be constrained even when information about representative misconduct is easily available and clearly influences voter perceptions.