Electoral Accountability Research Articles

Can information literacy increase political accountability? Linking information evaluation with obstinate partisanship via social media political homophily

ABSTRACT Scholars have recently sought to explain why some voters remain loyal to “their” parties or candidates “no matter what they do” – an attitude that has been labeled as obstinate partisanship (OP) and limits electoral accountability. We argue that the development of OP may have to do, at least partly, with people’s (in)ability to critically evaluate political information and their tendency to isolate themselves in online bubbles of congenial information and interactions. Building on this framework, we use two-wave panel survey data (NW1 = 1,259; NW2 = 982) to explore direct and indirect associations between information evaluation – a key component of information literacy – and OP. We find that information evaluation is negatively associated with OP in cross-sectional and autoregressive regression models. Analyses also support an indirect relationship between information evaluation and OP through political homophily in social media and online. We discuss possible implications for democracy and information literacy initiatives.

Unveiling the Perils – Addressing Clientelism and Corruption in Post-Communist Albania through Enlightened Civic Engagement and Electoral Accountability

This paper provides an overview of the challenges and dynamics surrounding the democratic transition and corruption in Albania over the past 30 years. It highlights the persistent issues of corruption, clientelism, and state capture within the country’s political landscape. Despite continuous reports from international entities and a growing concern regarding democratic developments, the road to European membership remains arduous. The influence of the same political elite and the re-election of corrupt leaders have contributed to the perpetuation of these issues. The prevalence of clientelism during electoral seasons has further complicated matters, with voters often prioritizing personal benefits over national-interest projects. Clientelism and clientelistic relationships put democratic instruments in jeopardy. In post-communist states, political science has had mixed success in discovering strategies to combat clientelism and ensure free and fair elections. In a post-communist society, the relationship between corruption and electoral responsibility is yet unknown. As a result, corrupt politicians continue to get elected over time. This theoretical paper presents a new technique for boosting citizen awareness about the existing situation of corruption and punishing corrupt politicians through voting. The breakdown of clientelistic links based on distributive advantages from rival political parties to citizens is at the heart of this strategy, as is developing a sense of belonging to a political grouping based on shared values and aims.

Career Concerns and the Dynamics of Electoral Accountability

AbstractQuantifying the value that legislators give to reelection relative to policy is crucial to understanding electoral accountability. We estimate the preferences for office and policy of members of the U.S. Senate, using a structural approach that exploits variation in polls, position‐taking, and advertising throughout the electoral cycle. We then combine these preference estimates with estimates of the electoral effectiveness of policy moderation and political advertising to quantify electoral accountability in competitive and uncompetitive elections. We find that senators differ markedly in the value they give to securing office relative to policy gains: While over a fourth of senators are highly ideological, a sizable number of senators are willing to make relatively large policy concessions to attain electoral gains. Nevertheless, electoral accountability is only moderate on average, due to the relatively low impact of changes in senators' policy stance on voter support.

Accountability and Grand Corruption

We propose a model of political careers and electoral accountability in an environment in which politicians may take bribes at different stages of their careers and in which politicians’ actions are only imperfectly observed by voters. We show that the expectation of promotion to higher office may motivate some politicians to behave worse at the latest stages of their careers, setting off a trade-off between providing incentives for good behavior at lower levels of office and selecting better politicians for higher office. Optimal rewards focus either on stamping out corruption at lower levels of office or on improving selection for higher office. (JEL D72, D73, K42)

Making Elections Work: Accountability with Selection and Control

We study the limits of dynamic electoral accountability when voters are uncertain about politicians’ characteristics (adverse selection) and their actions (moral hazard). Existing work argues that voters cannot achieve their first-best payoff. This is attributed to inherent deficiencies of the electoral contract, including voters’ inability to precommit, and the restriction to a binary retention-replacement decision. We provide conditions under which voters can, despite these constraints, obtain arbitrarily close to the first-best payoff in an equilibrium of the electoral interaction. Our paper resolves that there need not be a trade-off between selection and control. (JEL D72, D82)

Time to resolve insolvency and political elections

Theories on electoral accountability argue that politicians have strong incentives to avoid punishment from voters for poor administrative abilities. As their chances of reelection can be harmed by failure of businesses, politicians may encourage the speed up of insolvency proceedings to mitigate the voters’ punishment before the elections. Using a sample of 82 countries covering the period 2005–2017, we examined how legislative and presidential elections affect the time required to resolve corporate insolvency. Surprisingly, panel estimates reveal that the length of time to resolve insolvency tends to actually increase during periods of legislative elections and one year prior to such elections in the case of rehabilitation procedures. As the political agenda of the new government can affect the efficiency of restructuring plans, the uncertainty of legislative election outcomes can incentivize debtor and creditors to prolong the resolution of a firm’s reorganization to adjust the plan and/or adopt the most suitable plan. Additionally, our econometric approach reports no significant association between the duration of insolvency procedures and the cycle of presidential elections.

Human Rights During Transition: Accountability Mechanisms in Mexican States 1997–2008

This paper assesses the impact of political and fiscal accountability mechanisms on the severity and scope of human rights violations in Mexico's states during its democratic transition. First, we argue that elites in states with lower levels of electoral accountability are free of constraints that would normally result in their removal from office should they engage in human rights violations. Similarly, we argue that local elites maintain power while evading accountability when supported by transfers from the central government, and are thereby freer to use force. We find statistical support for our claims that lower levels of procedural democracy and higher levels of central transfers are associated with higher levels of human rights and physical integrity rights violations. These results are robust to subsample and numerous economic and other factors. Our findings suggest that particularly during democratic transitions, subnational institutions are salient in explaining the frequency of human rights violations.

Do they really care? Social desirability bias in attitudes towards corruption

Direct estimates based on election returns show that corruption is mildly punished at the polls. A large majority of survey respondents, however, often tend to state that they do not like corruption and will not support corrupt politicians. This has been interpreted as a product of social desirability bias: interviewees prefer to report socially accepted attitudes (rejection of corruption) instead of truthful responses (intention to vote for their preferred candidates regardless of malfeasance). We test to what extent this is the case by using a list experiment that allows interviewees to be questioned in an unobtrusive way, removing the possible effects of social desirability. Our results show that the great majority of respondents report intentions to electorally punish allegedly corrupt candidates even when asked in an unobtrusive way. We discuss the implications of this finding for the limited electoral accountability of corruption.

Electoral Accountability and Control in US Cities

Electoral Accountability and Control in US Cities

Who pays for crime? Criminal violence, right-wing incumbents, and electoral accountability in Latin America

Are right-wing incumbents punished for failures in public security? Partisan accountability models predict greater sanctions for politicians who fail to deliver on issues they “own.” According to this logic, right-wing incumbents should suffer more from crime spikes. Contrary to this expectation, we show that right-wing governments are not always punished for sudden increases in crime just before an election. We take advantage of rich local crime data in Chile and Mexico to identify places that experienced a crime shock, and use a difference-in-differences design to illustrate the heterogeneous electoral effects of public security failures. We also provide survey evidence from 18 Latin American countries to improve the external validity of the main findings. We hold that right-wing incumbents’ greater electoral resilience to crime spikes could be explained by voters attributing security failures to exogenous factors or by voters still perceiving left-wing and centrist challengers as less competent at addressing crime.

The accountability of politicians in international crises and the nature of audience cost

AbstractWe study the problem of how citizens should punish or reward a leader's choices during international crises. Audiences should impose costs rooted in citizens’ preferences over policy outcomes, but that need not mean that these costs directly reflect the citizens’ preferences over actions. Instead, rewards and punishments are valued for their equilibrium consequences. To understand how citizens’ policy preferences shape electoral accountability, we characterize the retention strategies that maximize citizen welfare. In the optimal strategy, citizens always punish leaders who initiate crises and then back down. This is a robust finding, and true even though the citizens have no intrinsic preferences for policy consistency. Whether they punish leaders for backing down rather than going to war, on the other hand, depends on the status quo and on the costs of war. Importantly, these strategies of rewarding and punishing leaders need not have any immediate connection to voter's ex ante preferences over war and peace, even if preferences over policy outcomes ultimately motivate citizen behavior. This has important implications for interpreting empirical and experimental results related to audience costs.

Does sports success increase government support? Voter (ir)rationality in a multiparty context

A growing number of studies discuss the impact of non-political factors on the political success of incumbents. Theoretically, this literature addresses core ideas about electoral accountability and voter rationality. Scholars have explored factors such as shark attacks, weather, natural disasters, and sports results. So far, the evidence has been inconclusive and almost exclusively from majoritarian contexts, where government accountability is easy for voters to assign. We contribute with an analysis of whether nationally important sports success, such as Olympic gold medals, affect support for coalition governments in a multiparty context. We use monthly polling from Finland for a 28-year period from Jan 1994 to Dec 2021, which we combine with data on sports success. Our analysis shows that nationally important sports success has no impact on government popularity. The finding holds while controlling for traditional drivers of government popularity and across different operationalizations of government support and sports success. With this finding, the study joins several previous analyses, which have been supportive of voter rationality.

Critical Actors in a Dominant-Party Parliament? Representing Marginalised Communities in Singapore

Abstract Who speaks for marginalised communities in dominant-party parliaments, where electoral accountability is weak? While existing work demonstrates the persistent salience of a legislator’s personal identity in such settings, we build on recent ‘critical actor’ theory to argue for factors beyond identity-based selection to explain why representatives might speak for marginalised communities. To this end, we use a mixed-methods approach to analyse the representation of six marginal communities in Singapore’s dominant-party system. A quantitative content analysis of all 8246 parliamentary questions filed from 2011 to 2020 shows that in addition to representative gender and ethnics identities, prior careers and political tenure also influence marginal community representation. In-depth interviews with seven Member of Parliament help identify precise mechanisms for such representation, including shared experience, career-derived awareness, political freshness and representative philosophies. That said, not all marginalised communities are well-represented, reflecting constraints on individual legislator-driven representation amidst broader party electoral strategies in non-competitive systems.

How Organizational Capacity Can Improve Electoral Accountability

AbstractThe organizational structure of the bureaucracy is a key determinant of policy outcomes. Bureaucratic agencies exhibit wide variation in their organizational capacity, which allows politicians to strategically shape policy implementation. This article examines what bureaucratic structure implies for the ability of voters to hold politicians electorally accountable. It explicitly models differences in organizational capacity across bureaucratic agencies and considers a problem where a politician must decide not only which policy to choose but which agency, or combination of agencies, will implement it. The choice of implementation feeds back into the choice of policy and this, in turn, affects how voters perceive the performance of the incumbent. This creates a chain of interdependence from agency structure to policy choice and political accountability. The formal model shows that the variation in organizational capacity serves the interests of voters by improving electoral control of politicians.

Electoral incentives make politicians respond to voter preferences: Evidence from a survey experiment with members of Parliament in Belgium

AbstractBackgroundResearch shows that there is variation in how responsive individual politicians are to voter preferences. One explanation, it is commonly argued, lies in politicians' varying electoral motivations.MethodsWe test this assumption in a survey‐embedded experiment in which Belgian Members of parliament were asked what position they would take on a policy proposal after a random half of them had been shown real survey data indicating that their party voters were in favor of this policy.ResultsWe find that politicians who feel unsure about their re‐election adapt their behavior more to be in line with the preferences of voters than confident politicians. Moreover, the anticipation of electoral accountability fosters responsiveness; the more politicians anticipate to be held accountable on Election Day for what they do and say, the more they respond to voter preferences.ConclusionThese ideas are not new, yet we are the first to isolate them empirically and demonstrate their individual‐level foundations.

White Constituents and Congressional Voting

Why do some members of Congress vote more on the extremes of their party than others? I argue that lawmakers representing more homogeneously white districts have greater electoral incentive to moderate their voting records, since the two parties compete more for support of white voters than for the support of minority voters. I provide evidence using roll-call votes from the U.S. House and Senate. I find members representing more homogeneously white districts have more moderate voting records, a finding that holds for Democrats and Republicans. I explore two potential mechanisms: legislator responsiveness and electoral punishment. While legislators do not seem to adjust their voting behavior in response to short-term changes in district racial composition, more homogeneously white districts are found to assess larger vote share penalties on more extreme candidates in general elections. The findings have implications for our understanding of race, representation, and electoral accountability.

Data-driven campaigning and democratic disruption: Evidence from six advanced democracies

Data-driven campaigning has become one of the key foci for academic and non-academic audiences interested in political communication. Widely seen to have transformed political practice, it is often argued that data-driven campaigning is a force of significant democratic disruption because it contributes to a fragmentation of political discourse, undermines prevailing systems of electoral accountability and subverts ‘free’ and ‘fair’ elections. In this article, we present one of the very first cross-national analyses of data-driven campaigning by political parties. Drawing on empirical research conducted by experts in six advanced democracies, we show that the data-driven campaign practices seen to threaten democracy are often not manifest in party campaigns. Instead, we see a set of practices that build on pre-existing techniques and which are far less sophisticated than is often assumed. Indeed, we present evidence that most political parties lack the capacity to execute the hyper-intensive practices often associated with data-driven campaigning. Hence, while there is reason to remain alert to the challenges data-driven campaigning produces for democratic norms, we argue that this practice is not inherently disruptive, but rather exemplifies the evolving nature of political campaigning in the 21st century.

Audits for Accountability: Evidence from Municipal By-Elections in South Africa

Theories of retrospective accountability assume that voters punish poor governance and reward improvements, yet empirical evidence remains mixed. We extend this research to a new context, assessing the impact of audits on electoral outcomes in South African municipalities. Our novel identification strategy focuses on by-elections triggered by deaths in office of local councilors and compares those taking place before and after audit results are announced each year. We find that timely audit information affects the vote share of the responsible party, with voters rewarding improvements and punishing poor audits by about 5 percentage points. Additional individual-level survey evidence confirms the underpinning behavioral response more generally. Our study is the first to demonstrate electoral accountability effects of audit information at full scale, involving universal spatial and temporal coverage as well as public and organic dissemination.

Part-time parliamentarians? Evidence from outside earnings and parliamentary activities

I examine how outside earnings relate to absence rates and parliamentary activities using new data for members of seven German state parliaments. The setting is compelling because reforms of disclosure requirements for outside earnings provide finer-grained data, tackling challenges of previous studies. The full sample results do not suggest that outside earnings were overall correlated with absence rates, speeches, interpellations, or group initiatives. I also examine heterogeneity across age cohorts, government and opposition parties, and modes of entry into parliament. MPs who entered parliament via party lists reduce their parliamentary activities the most when they receive higher outside earnings, suggesting that electoral accountability matters for the relationship between outside earnings and MPs’ efforts in parliament. Results for subgroups of MPs also point to an increase in parliamentary activities when certain MPs receive higher outside earnings, indicating that high-performing MPs reconcile their side jobs with their parliamentary duties. Outside earnings may therefore give rise to a shift in the focus of MPs’ parliamentary work.

Electoral accountability and political competence

Much research contends that candidate competence brings technical or political skill, such that selecting against such attributes seems irrational. However, if special interest coalitions are sufficiently strong, a majority may expect that political expertise will be used to select policies that generate rents for narrow constituencies at the expense of its own welfare. I develop a model in which a majority prefers to elect the less competent politician in order to undermine the incumbent’s ability to pursue the special interest agenda and derive the implications for accountability in this setting. The results demonstrate that the majority’s attempts to reassert control over policy through its retention decisions impede social welfare maximizing reform and distort aggregate welfare by either encouraging ([Formula: see text]) inefficient policy selection or ([Formula: see text]) inefficient candidate selection. Even if politicians choose policies that maximize social welfare doing so may only worsen aggregate welfare by providing voters with more information about candidate competence, which enables the majority to better select inept politicians.