Electoral Accountability Research Articles

Nuanced Voters in Japan: Estimating Transition between Economic and Accountability Voting

Recent retrospective voting studies have focused not only on the retrospective economic voting (economic voting), but also on the retrospective accountability voting (accountability voting). Retrospective voting based on voter’s evaluations of economic conditions is considered economic voting, whereas accountability voting is where voters consider the consistency between promises the government makes and what it actually implements. Voters are assumed to waver between economic and accountability voting; this balance informs time-series transitions in relative weight given to each in voting behavior. Referring to such voters as nuanced voters, this research uses the case of Japan’s electoral politics and attempts to determine historical change in retrospective voting patterns. In this study, electoral accountability is set as the deviation of the realized (observed) value from the promised value by the government. Two types of analysis are then conducted: the impulse-response functions between economic/accountability voting and the cabinet approval rate by a Bayesian structural vector autoregressive (B-SVAR) model, and time-series contributions of economic/accountability components for approval ratings by historical decompositions (HDC). Assuming that the weight of economic/accountability voting changed after 1993-94 electoral institutional reform in Japan, a transition in the behavior of nuanced voters was clearly apparent in public works spendings in the private goods sphere. Moreover, according to theoretical expectations, accountability voting in regard to government expenditures and GDP predominated both pre- and post-reform, and neither nuanced change between economic and accountability voting nor critical change after reform were observed.

The Structure of Political Institutions and Effectiveness of Corporate Political Lobbying

This paper investigates how the structure of political institutions influences the effectiveness of corporate political lobbying by shaping the “veto points” and “entry points” that lobbying firms encounter and require, respectively, when attempting to influence public policies; in so doing, this study deepens our understanding of the strategic implications of institutional environments. Using large-sample and cross-country firm-level data, we find that the influence of firms’ lobbying activities on public policies is weakened when there are tighter constraints generated as a result of greater political (partisan) competition and more subnational government tiers. We find that the negative association between the effectiveness of lobbying and political (partisan) competition is particularly pronounced in countries with lower electoral accountability and that the negative association between the effectiveness of lobbying and subnational government tiers is particularly pronounced in more centralized political systems.

Lessons for Scotland from Greece's Euro Tragedy

Scotland will soon decide whether to remain part of the U.K. or become an independent nation. Should Scotland choose independence, it may try to join a formal currency union with the U.K. or the E.U. This article focuses on the risks small nations can face in a currency union, as told through the prism of Greece’s experience in the Eurozone. Since the world financial crisis hit Europe, Greece has become the worst case scenario for small countries in a currency union. The austerity conditions the Troika requires in exchange for hundreds of billions in loans have caused a depression and unemployment crisis of historic magnitude in Greece, without reducing its debt. Greece would almost certainly be better off defaulting on its debt, but cannot do so in an orderly fashion because default would certainly mean a calamitous expulsion from the E.U. Greece is also something akin to a zombie democracy. All of the important decisions are effectively made by the Troika who have no electoral accountability to the Greek people. Joining a currency union always entails some loss of sovereignty and the benefits can certainly outweigh the risks. However, Greece shows that important aspects of national self-determination like tax policy, spending, interest rates, unemployment targets, pensions, work rules, etc., can be compromised if a country gives up its currency and is hit by financial calamity. These types of risks – ones that go to a newly independent country’s ability to function as a democratic state – are important risks to consider if Scotland chooses independence and chooses to join a currency union.

Is Voter Competence Good for Voters?: Information, Rationality, and Democratic Performance

A long research tradition in behavioral political science evaluates the performance of democracy by examining voter competence. This literature got its start arguing that voters' lack of information undermines a defense of democracy rooted in electoral accountability. A more recent literature deepens the debate, with some authors claiming that voters effectively use cues to substitute for information about candidates and policies, and other authors claiming that voters are insufficiently rational to do so. We argue that, regardless of its conclusions about voter competence, this literature’s single-minded focus on voter behavior is misguided. We use a sequence of formal models to show that traditional intuitions are incomplete because they ignore the effect that changes in voter behavior have on the equilibrium behavior of politicians. When this strategic interaction is taken into account, increases in voter information or voter rationality sometimes make democratic performance better and sometimes make democratic performance worse. One simply cannot assess the implications of voter characteristics for democratic performance without also studying how those characteristics affect the behavior of politicians.

The Politics of Counterterrorism Provision: Terrorist Threats, Transparency and Electoral Accountability

The prevention of terrorist attacks is an important policy concern for many governments. In democracies, officials also fear the electoral consequences of successful attacks. As a result, counterterrorism policy-making and electoral concerns are tightly intertwined. To understand the implications of this link, I develop a game-theoretic model and show that left-wing incumbents respond to terror threats more aggressively than their right-wing counterparts in order to convince voters that they can be trusted in the fight against terrorism. Terrorist attacks improve right-wing incumbents' reputation, while they worsen the reputation of left-wing incumbents. When the future terror threat is likely to be high, voters ignore right-wing incumbents’ reputation, reelecting them independently of their performance. This bail out effect of a high threat is likely to drive the mixed empirical results on the electoral consequences of terrorist attacks, and explains right-wing incumbents' effort to maintain a climate of fear within the public.

Linkages of Electoral Accountability: Empirical Results and Methodological Lessons

A basic theory of electoral accountability is widely accepted by academic opinion: voters cause politicians to gain or lose office through periodic elections, thereby influencing policy through the threat of electoral sanction. Empirical studies run the gamut from findings of strong support for this theory, to mixed or conditional support, to weak or negative results. When electoral processes are analyzed in terms of two distinct causal linkages within a three-part chain of accountability, however, positive findings are revealed as weaker than they appear while a compelling trend emerges toward findings ranging from conditional to negative in the last two decades. This trend is visible in three topical areas—economic voting, political corruption, and ideological congruence—and it holds for both presidential and parliamentary regimes as well as for a variety of electoral systems. The new electoral skepticism’s unsettling results and insightful methods may help to improve future research and reform efforts alike.

Electoral accountability and local government efficiency: quasi-experimental evidence from the Italian health care sector reforms

Th is paper evaluates the effect of two policy changes on the efficiency of Italian regional governments in the provision of health care services: first a change in the electoral system; second a process of fiscal decentralisation. The electoral system was changed in 1995 and replaced a pure proportional system by a majoritarian system, fostering the transition of regional governments towards a presidential regime. The process of fiscal decentralisation took effect in 1998, when intergovernmental grants earmarked for the health care sector were replaced by regional taxes. The Italian context offers a unique source of data to test the predictions of recent theoretical models that support a positive relationship between government efficiency and the electoral accountability enhanced by institutions such as electoral rules and fiscal decentralisation. The paper provides two main contributions: 1) a comprehensive analysis of the two main reforms that involved Italian regional governments and the health care sector during the 1990s; 2) the evaluation of the impact of the electoral reform in a quasi-experimental setting. The final results provide empirical evidence in line with the findings of the theoretical models.

Issues in Presidential Election Forecasting: Election Margins, Incumbency, and Model Credibility

Three issues of presidential election forecasting research are raised. The first concerns the consequences for forecasting models of presidential elections becoming more narrowly decided. A realigned and polarized party system has led to smaller election margins in presidential contests since 1984. This development complicates model estimation and may also have blurred differences between strong and weak forecasting models. The second issue concerns the presidential incumbency advantage. Forecasting research has shed greater light on this important electoral factor. The advantage of presidential incumbency appears to be largely restricted to first party-term incumbents. This exposes what might be seen as a blind spot to electoral accountability. Finally, the issue of forecast model credibility is raised. Several criteria beyond forecast accuracy should be taken into account in assessing whether a forecast model and its prediction are credible.

Crisis bargaining, domestic opposition, and tragic wars

Why do democracies sometimes fight long, politically divisive wars that end poorly? I argue that electoral accountability, induced by party competition, can sometimes promote this and other tragic outcomes. To demonstrate this, I analyze a bargaining model in which one state is conceived of as a unitary actor while the other consists of a government and an opposition that is motivated both by electoral ambition and concern for the national interest. Perhaps surprisingly, it is the opposition’s concern for the national interest that causes the most tragic outcomes, as they may choose not to advocate peace when doing so would prevent war so as to avoid undercutting the government’s bargaining position. I close with a discussion of why the United States appears to be particularly prone to such tragic outcomes, treating the Vietnam War as an illustrative example.

Problems in the Study of Political Institutions and Financial Crises: Time Period Dependence and Measurement Errors

Much of our understanding about possible links between systemic financial crises and political institutions -- such as democracy, electoral accountability, and checks and balances -- is based on empirical work with data that does not include the recent 2007/09 financial crisis. This is an important problem as countries affected by the recent crisis have systematically different political institutions from those that experienced crises over at least the previous 30 years. Results about political institutions may be severely biased if they are based on only data from the 1970s-mid 2000s period. They will tend to underestimate the probability that countries with highly accountable politicians will experience crises and overestimate the effectiveness of their crisis responses. Research into financial crises is also plagued by another more general measurement error problem. Crisis outcomes are opaque and can often take many years to fully materialize. This can produce highly biased variables in the near to medium term. But this problem is often not acknowledged by researchers. We show what effects these data problems can have by updating Keefer's (2007) research on the relationship between elections and financial crises. Based on these results, we argue that previous findings about the effect of political accountability on crises using pre-2007/09 crisis data likely overestimates their positive impact. We strongly urge researchers to carefully consider the possible affect time period dependence and measurement errors may have on previous research findings and the conclusions they draw from their data.

Civil Society and Electoral Accountability in Latin America. By Sharon F. Lean. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. Pp. xiv, 197. Notes. References. Index. $85.00 cloth.

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An Experimental Study of Electoral Incentives and Institutional Choice

AbstractI investigate the extent to which reputational incentives affect policy choices in the context of a controlled laboratory experiment. In theory, asymmetric information and outcome unobservability undermine electoral delegation by creating incentives for politicians to pander. Under the right conditions, it may be preferable to remove such incentives by removing accountability altogether. The data suggest that subjects playing the role of politicians fail to take advantage of voters even though voters indeed create the predicted electoral incentives, albeit in a weaker form than predicted by the theory. When given the choice of institutions via a novel elicitation method, subjects prefer to retain electoral accountability or to make decisions themselves through direct democracy, even though both institutions yield lower expected payoffs than delegation to unaccountable agents.

Lessons for an Independent Scotland From Greece's Euro Tragedy

Scotland will soon decide whether to remain part of the U.K. or become an independent nation. Should Scotland choose independence, it may try to join a formal currency union with the U.K. or the E.U. This article focuses on the risks small nations can face in a currency union, as told through the prism of Greece’s experience in the Eurozone. Since the world financial crisis hit Europe, Greece has become the worst case scenario for small countries in a currency union. The austerity conditions the Troika requires in exchange for hundreds of billions in loans have caused a depression and unemployment crisis of historic magnitude in Greece, without reducing its debt. Greece would almost certainly be better off defaulting on its debt, but cannot do so in an orderly fashion because default would certainly mean a calamitous expulsion from the E.U. Greece is also something akin to a zombie democracy. All of the important decisions are effectively made by the Troika who have no electoral accountability to the Greek people. Joining a currency union always entails some loss of sovereignty and the benefits can certainly outweigh the risks. However, Greece shows that important aspects of national self-determination like tax policy, spending, interest rates, unemployment targets, pensions, work rules, etc., can be compromised if a country gives up its currency and is hit by financial calamity. These types of risks–ones that go to a newly independent country’s ability to function as a democratic state-are important risks to consider if Scotland chooses independence and chooses to join a currency union.

Challenging Executive Dominance inEuropean Democracy

Executive dominance in the contemporaryEUis part of a wider migration of executive power towards types of decision making that eschew electoral accountability and popular democratic control. This democratic gap is fed by far‐going secrecy arrangements and practices exercised in a concerted fashion by the various executive actors at different levels of governance and resulting in the blacking out of crucial information and documents – even for parliaments. Beyond a deconstruction exercise on the nature and location ofEUexecutive power and secretive working practices, this article focuses on the challenges facing parliaments in particular. It seeks to reconstruct a more pro‐active and networked role of parliaments – both national andEuropean – as countervailing power. In this vision parliaments must assert themselves in a manner that is true to their role in the political system and that is not dictated by government at any level.

Voter Behavior, Term Limits, and Seniority Advantage in Pork-Barrel Politics

This paper explores electoral accountability in a legislative system favoring 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. I use subjects´ preferences on abortion to capture incumbents´ policy choices where subjects vote to determine whether a donation is allocated to a pro-choice or to a pro-life nonprofit to create tension between visceral and monetary incentives. I find term limits to be effective, but not infallible, for avoiding the seniority trap.

The Impact of Fiscal and Political Decentralization on Local Public Investments in Indonesia

We investigate the effects of the Indonesian decentralization and democratization process on budget allocation at the sub-national level. Based on panel data for 271 Indonesian districts for the years of 1994 to 2009, we address the determinants of local investment expenditures in public infrastructure in the sectors of education, health, and physical infrastructure. We find that after the dramatic expenditure decentralization of 2001, districts with relatively lower levels of public infrastructure started to invest more in these sectors. In contrast to the marked budgeting changes following the fiscal and administrative decentralization, we find no consistent effects of the democratization process on local public investments. Our results reflect initial improvements in local targeting but show no evidence of increasing electoral accountability.

Holding parties responsible at election time: Multi-level, multi-party government and electoral accountability

This paper highlights the crucial role played by party-specific responsibility attributions in performance-based voting. Three models of electoral accountability, which make distinct assumptions regarding citizens' ability to attribute responsibility to distinct governing parties, are tested in the challenging Northern Ireland context – an exemplar case of multi-level multi-party government in which expectations of performance based voting are low. The paper demonstrates the operation of party-attribution based electoral accountability, using data from the 2011 Northern Ireland Assembly Election Study. However, the findings are asymmetric: accountability operates in the Protestant/unionist bloc but not in the Catholic/nationalist bloc. This asymmetry may be explained by the absence of clear ethno-national ideological distinctions between the unionist parties (hence providing political space for performance based accountability to operate) but the continued relevance in the nationalist bloc of ethno-national difference (which limits the scope for performance politics). The implications of the findings for our understanding of the role of party-specific responsibility attribution in performance based models of voting, and for our evaluation of the quality of democracy in post-conflict consociational polities, are discussed.

Perception of political corruption as a function of legislation

Purpose – The main aim of the paper is to determine whether countries with enacted legislation on electoral accountability issues (such as conflict of interest, revolving doors, asset disclosure, lobbying, immunity, political party funding and a code of conduct for politicians) have lower corruption perception than countries that do not have legislation on those variables. Design/methodology/approach – The author utilised the corruption reports developed by the corruption country experts appointed by the EU DG Home and carried a correlation analysis between the above variables and the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) developed by Transparency International. Findings – A correlation was only found for the asset disclosure variable and CPI. Alternative factors borne out of the literature are briefly discussed and suggestions for future research are made. Research limitations/implications – Due to the small sample size (n=26), the statistical analysis that could be carried out was limited. Practical implications – One policy implication of the negative finding obtained is that politicians are well advised to invest in measures that will enhance the electorate's trust in them. Passing anti-corruption legislation alone does not yield low corruption perception. Originality/value – This is the first study of its kind addressing corruption correlates by looking at electorate accountability.

“It’s the politics, stupid!”. The politicization of anti-corruption in Italy

This article aims to analyze the relationship between judicial activism against political corruption and electoral accountability. The judiciary plays a pivotal role in enforcing anti-corruption legislation, and, in many countries, courts have moved closer and closer towards that kind of working. In the article, we analyze the conditions under which a judicial prosecution of corrupt practices can also lead to electoral punishment of political misconducts by voters, or to a failure of accountability mechanisms. The latter outcome is more likely to occur if judicial activism is politicized. The ‘politicization’ of anti-corruption initiatives is here defined as an increase in the polarization of opinions, interests, or values about judicial investigations and the extent to which this polarization is strategically advanced towards the political debate by parties, political leaders, and media. By crystallizing a new dimension of political conflict, political actors can negatively affect electoral accountability, diminishing the risk of electoral punishment. We study this phenomenon by analyzing the case of Italy, a country which has experienced high levels of politicization of anti-corruption. However, whether and to what extent anti-corruption policies can be politicized is a question open for many other countries that can take a similar path.

Civil society and electoral accountability in Latin America

Civil society and electoral accountability in Latin America