Electoral accountability,clarity of responsibility and labor market policy

Does the exercise of accountability in elections have palpable policy effects? Building on recent advances in the economic voting literature, we show that electoral accountability leaves an imprint on labor market policy when left-wing governments are in office. When responsibility for the economy is clear and elections offer an opportunity to claim credit for economic expansion, labor protections and benefits become more generous. However, when clarity of responsibility is low and incumbents can expect to veer electoral responsibility, left-wing governments are more likely to retrench labor market policy. These results hold for policies benefiting both labor market insiders and outsiders. Consistent with evidence that the labor market is the purview of the left, electoral accountability does not condition labor market policy under right-wing governments. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of growing party system fragmentation and weaker accountability across advanced industrial democracies.     

Who's to blame? How performance evaluation and partisanship influence responsibility attribution in grand coalition governments

This article examines a neglected but fundamental facet of electoral accountability: responsibility attribution under grand coalition governments. Contrary to much of the existing literature that focuses on retrospective voting, this article focuses on responsibility attribution testing the effect of perceived performance of the government and partisan attachments for parties in grand coalition governments. Novel survey questions on responsibility attribution from Austria and Germany show that when the lines of responsibility are blurred, partisanship functions as an important heuristic for all voters including supporters of opposition parties. These findings have important implications for our understanding of electoral accountability and political representation in grand coalition governments.     

International Constraints and Electoral Decisions: Does the Room to Maneuver Attenuate Economic Voting?

Prominent studies of electoral accountability and economic voting suggest that government constraints and international financial structures decrease the economic vote. The proposed mechanism is often labeled as the “room to maneuver,” and it posits that because elected officials have limited space to propose and implement economic policy, politicians can shirk responsibility, and thus voters are less likely to place voting weights on the economy. However, results from elections that took place in Europe during the Great Recession and scholarly research on economic voting in these elections cast serious doubts on the causal mechanism. This article directly tests this mechanism with a survey experiment using data from Greece (the country most affected by the debt crisis). The results suggest that although the economic vote is strong and substantive, its size does not vary across the room to maneuver treatments. This finding informs the literature on economic voting and carries out important implications for party strategies with respect to exogenous policy impositions and their electoral effects.     

Who is responsible? The effect of clarity of responsibility on voter turnout

Does voters’ ability to discern who is responsible for policy outcomes affect voter turnout? Although particular institutional arrangements which influence this ability – known as clarity of responsibility – appear to affect how voters form retrospective judgements, existing literature is less informed about its role on voter turnout. This article argues that voters tend to turn out less if they cannot discern who is responsible for policy outcomes. This lack of clarity hinders the process of retrospective evaluations, makes the electoral stakes less profound, and dampens the voters’ political efficacy. Using 396 elections in 34 established democracies between 1960 and 2015, it is found that lower clarity of responsibility is associated with lower voter turnout. This study highlights the importance of clarity of responsibility, as it enhances democratic accountability, not only by encouraging retrospective voting, but also by increasing political participation.     

How do citizens attribute responsibility in multilevel states? Learning,biases and asymmetric federalism. Evidence from Spain

Recent empirical evidence suggests that decentralization challenges the stakes of democratic control by blurring responsibility attribution between levels of government. Exploring the implications of decentralization on accountability requires a better understanding of the conditions under which decentralization affects clarity of responsibility. The theoretical claim in this article is that these conditions are related to the particular design and duration of decentralization arrangements. To test this proposition, individual data from a system where decentralization varies both in design and duration – the Spanish State of Autonomies – are used. Results show that clarity of responsibility has worsened where decentralization has adopted a more intertwined (marble-cake) design and that individuals may “learn” on responsibility attribution the longer they experience a particular distribution of competences.     

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.     

Government Constraints and Accountability: Economic Voting in Greece Before and During the IMF Intervention

Incumbent parties in Southern Europe experienced losses in their electoral support that came along with a series of economic reforms imposed by the EU and the IMF. However, recent theories of accountability would predict lower levels of economic voting given the limited room left for national governments to manoeuvre the economy. To resolve this puzzle, the paper presents and models quarterly vote intention time series data from Greece (2000–2012) and links it with the state of the economy. The empirical results show that after the bailout loan agreement Greek voters significantly shifted their assignment of responsibility for (economic) policy outcomes from the EU to the national government, which in turn heightened the impact of objective economic conditions on governing party support. The findings have implications for theories linking international structures, government constraints and democratic accountability.     

Retrospective pledge voting: A comparative study of the electoral consequences of government parties’ pledge fulfilment

Does pledge fulfilment bear any electoral consequences for government parties? While previous research on retrospective voting has largely focused on electoral accountability with respect to the economy, the theoretical framework presented in this study links government parties’ performance to their previous electoral pledges. It is argued that government parties are more likely to be rewarded by voters when they have fulfilled more pledges during the legislative term. Good pledge performance of a party is associated with the ability to maximise policy benefits (accomplishment) and to be a responsible actor that will stick to its promises in the future as well (competence). Analysing data from 69 elections in 14 countries shows that a government party's electoral outcome is affected by its previous pledge performance. A government party that fulfils a higher share of election pledges is more likely to prevent electoral losses. This finding indicates that voters react at the polls to party pledge fulfilment, which highlights the crucial role of promissory representation in democratic regimes. Surprisingly and in contrast with economic voting, there is no evidence that retrospective pledge voting is moderated by clarity of responsibility.     

Rules,institutions and the economic vote: clarifying clarity of responsibility

Abstract

Institutions are thought to matter for vote choice, and work on economic voting is exemplary in this regard. The strength of the economic vote varies considerably cross-nationally and this seems to emanate from differences in the clarity of responsibility. Still, this conceptual frame, dominant in the field, appears to have some cracks. First, almost all work presents analyses of the economic vote in smaller, split samples of low- and high-clarity contexts separately. Second, the literature appears rather dispersed when the conceptual and empirical indicators are examined. The article attempts to overcome these limitations by analysing a large pool of democratic elections with a series of objective indicators. It investigates these indicators separately, and as components within two cumulative indices (institutional rules and power patterns). The results indicate that, even though there are indications of differences in the strength of the economic vote in high- and low-clarity contexts respectively, institutional rules or power patterns fail to significantly deflect the overall electoral impact of economic growth.     

Can electors combat corruption? Institutional arrangements and citizen behaviour

Studies interested in the cross‐national levels of corruption have concluded that specific institutional characteristics drive the aggregate variation. In countries with high institutional clarity and plurality electoral systems, corruption tends to be lower since increased voter monitoring and clarity of responsibility incentivise politicians to deliver virtuous policies. However, the underlying accountability mechanism has never been tested at the individual level. It is still unclear whether (1) voters do place voting weights on corruption, and (2) whether these weights vary in response to aggregate institutional characteristics. In this article, survey data from 23 democracies is used to put the accountability micro‐mechanism to this test. While there is some evidence that voters do vote on the basis of corruption, the moderating effect of institutional characteristics is not as strong as previously thought.     

Economic voting in Portuguese municipal elections

This paper analyses the impact of economic conditions on Portuguese municipal electoral outcomes. We use two extensive datasets to estimate an economic voting model which accounts for the possibility that different levels of government have different levels of responsibility for economic outcomes and for clarity of government responsibility. The empirical results indicate that the performance of the national economy is important especially if local governments are of the same party as the central government. The municipal situation is also relevant particularly in scenarios of greater clarity of national and sub-national government responsibility.     

Democratic Accountability and Retrospective Voting: A Laboratory Experiment

Understanding the incentives of politicians requires understanding the nature of voting behavior. I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning. If voters are forward‐looking but uncertain about politicians’ unobservable characteristics, then it is rational to focus on selection. But doing so undermines democratic accountability because selection renders sanctioning an empty threat. In contrast to rational choice predictions, the experimental results indicate a strong behavioral tendency to use a retrospective voting rule. Additional experiments support the interpretation that retrospective voting is a simple heuristic that voters use to cope with a cognitively difficult inference and decision problem and, in addition, suggest that voters have a preference for accountability. The results pose a challenge for theories of electoral selection and voter learning and suggest new interpretations of empirical studies of economic and retrospective voting.     

THE TYPOLOGY OF FISCAL DECENTRALISATION SYSTEM: A CLUSTER ANALYSIS APPROACH

The article suggests a novel theoretical framework for empirical measurement of fiscal decentralisation by taking the viewpoint that fiscal decentralisation should be regarded as a system. Then, we review in detail several institutional arrangements regarding fiscally decentralised systems including the following: federal versus unitary state, numbers of tiers of governments, taxing power, borrowing power and independence of local officials. After identifying these institutional arrangements, we can group different countries with similar institutionally fiscal decentralisation systems together in broad categories by using cluster analysis. This analysis reveals a typology of fiscally decentralised systems (FDS): high expenditure/revenue assignment FDS, low expenditure/revenue assignment FDS, revenue transfer FDS, most complete FDS, politically centralised FDS and unitary state FDS. We then employ regression analysis to examine the performance for each type of fiscal decentralisation system. Our empirical findings suggest that most complete FDS is positively associated with selective economic performance as well as various public governance indicators. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Government Responsibility and Electoral Accountability in Federations

Because federalism can be a threat to accountability, a modelof voting behavior in federations must accommodate voters' attributionsof responsibility to each order of government for policy outcomes.This study uses a panel survey of Canadians in both federaland provincial elections to ask whether voters are able to holdgovernments accountable in a federal context. Voters may ignoreissues where responsibility is unclear, they may reward or punishboth the federal and provincial governments to the same degree,or the confusion of jurisdiction may sour them on the governmentor even the political system. Canadians who blamed both governmentsfor problems in health care did not lake this judgment to theirvoting decision in either the 2000 federal election or the 2001elections in Alberta and British Columbia, while those who couldidentify primary responsibility did so. Federalism and intergovernmentalpolicymaking may reduce voters' ability to hold their governmentsaccountable.     

Economic crisis and elections: The European periphery

This paper introduces the articles in the symposium which address the issue of democratic accountability and economic voting in polities on the European periphery. The economic crisis that hit the world economy in 2008 has severely challenged the capacity of governments to steer the national economy and has had a strong impact on their electoral support. The papers discuss whether economic voting and democratic accountability are increasing or, on the other hand, they could be depressed by globalisation and by shifts of ruling competence from the national to the supranational European arena.     

Who is responsible for what? Clarity of responsibilities in multilevel states: The case of Spain

There is a theoretical disagreement between the classical normative positive view on decentralisation, which states that the fragmentation of power shifts policy more closely into line with citizens' preferences, and a more recent critical view that states that decentralisation blurs attribution of responsibility. This disagreement can only be resolved by refining the understanding of specific institutional designs. The theoretical claim in this article is that the relation between multilevel governance and clarity of responsibilities is contingent upon the type of decentralisation in place. To test this proposition, individual data from an asymmetrically decentralised system – the Spanish State of Autonomies – are used. Results show that the relationship between decentralisation and clarity of responsibility has a u‐shape. Responsibility attribution is clearer in regions with high and low levels of decentralisation, where one level of government clearly predominates over the other, than in regions with a more intertwined distribution of powers.     

Voter perceptions of agenda power and attribution of responsibility for economic performance

In two recent experiments (one in the lab and one over the internet) concerning collective decision making we determined that individuals mainly assign responsibility to the decision maker with agenda power and with the largest vote share (Duch et al., 2012). We found rather weak evidence that responsibility is assigned to decision makers with veto power or allocated proportional to weighted voting power. Our conjecture then is that individuals in our online experiment who recognized the importance of proposal power in the embedded experiment will be those more likely to exercise an economic vote for the Conservative PM Party (since they are the agenda setter in the governing coalition) and for the opposition Labour Party. The conjecture is confirmed. Essentially, the data show that economic voting at the individual level is confined to individuals who understand the value of proposal power. This in turn suggests that the economic vote itself is motivated by a coherent attempt to punish or reward parties that actually deserve it in the specific sense that they were mostly responsible for choosing the policies that were implemented. Further, the strong reliance on proposal power as the workhorse of this mechanism of accountability, tells us that simple heuristics can do a lot of the work that cold rationality and complex calculation have done in much of the previous discussion of economic voting.     

Clarity of responsibility: How government cohesion conditions performance voting

Recent literature has shown that the long established link between economic performance and electoral outcomes is conditioned by a country's institutions and government, what is often termed ‘clarity of responsibility’. In this article two distinct dimensions of the clarity of the political context are identified: institutional and government clarity. The first captures the formal dispersion of government power, both horizontally and vertically. The second captures the cohesion of the incumbent government. Analysing survey data from 27 European countries, it is shown that voters' ability to hold governments to account, for both the economy and management of public services, is primarily influenced by the extent to which there is an identifiable and cohesive incumbent, whereas formal institutional rules have no direct impact on performance voting.     

Pass the Buck If You Can: How Partisan Competition Triggers Attribution Bias in Multilevel Democracies

Voters’ ability to hold politicians accountable has been shown to be limited in systems of multilevel government. The existence of multiple tiers of government blurs the lines of responsibility, making it more difficult for voters to assign credit or blame for policy performance. However, much less is known about how the vertical division of responsibility affects citizens’ propensity to rationalize responsibility attributions on the basis of group attachment. While these two processes have similar observable implications, they imply markedly different micro-mechanisms. Using experimental and observational data, this paper examines how the partisan division of power moderates the impact of voters’ partisanship and feelings of territorial attachment on attributions of responsibility for the regional economy. Our analyses show that partisan-based attribution bias varies systematically with the partisan context, such that it only emerges in regions where a party other than the national incumbent controls the regional government. We also find that responsibility judgments are rationalized on the basis of territorial identities only when a regional nationalist party is in control of the regional government. Our results contribute to explaining the contextual variations in the strength of regional economic voting and more generally to understanding one of the mechanisms through which low clarity of responsibility reduces government accountability.     

Clarity of responsibility and foreign policy performance voting

Do voters’ assessments of the government's foreign policy performance influence their vote intentions? Does the ‘clarity of responsibility’ in government moderate this relationship? Existing research on the United States demonstrates that the electorate's foreign policy evaluations influence voting behaviour. Whether a similar relationship exists across the advanced democracies in Europe remains understudied, as does the role of domestic political institutions that might generate responsibility diffusion and dampen the effect of foreign policy evaluations on vote choice. Using the attitudinal measures of performance from the 2011 Transatlantic Trends survey collected across 13 European countries, these questions are answered in this study through testing on incumbent vote the diffusion‐inducing effects of five key domestic factors frequently used in the foreign policy analysis literature. Multilevel regression analyses conclude that the electorate's ability to assign punishment decreases at higher levels of responsibility diffusion, allowing policy makers to circumvent the electoral costs of unpopular foreign policy. Specifically, coalition governments, semi‐presidential systems, ideological dispersion among the governing parties and the diverse allocation of the prime ministerial and foreign policy portfolios generate diffusion, dampening the negative effects of foreign policy disapproval on vote choice. This article contributes not only to the debate on the role of foreign policy in electoral politics, but also illustrates the consequential effects of domestic institutions on this relationship.