Motivated Reasoning and Democratic Accountability

Does motivated reasoning harm democratic accountability? Substantial evidence from political behavior research indicates that voters have “directional motives” beyond accuracy, which is often taken as they are ill equipped to hold politicians accountable. We develop a model of electoral accountability with reasoners. Directional motives two effects: (1) divergence —voters different preferences beliefs, and (2) desensitization —the relationship between incumbent performance voter beliefs weakened. While does accountability, this generally driven by desensitized rather than polarized partisans politically divergent beliefs. also analyze the government vote shares, showing while always weakens relationship, we cannot infer harmed. Finally, show our can be mapped standard models in fully Bayesian but or information.