The Economic Consequences of Electoral Accountability Revisited

Preferring a Pound of Cure to an Ounce of Prevention: Retrospective Voting and Failures in Electoral Accountability

Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? What are the consequences of failures in electoral accountability? Using a novel dataset on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward incumbents for delivering disaster relief spending but not for investing in disaster prevention spending. This failure of electoral accou...

Campaign Promises, Economic Performance, and Electoral Accountability in Latin America

Crossing Party Lines: The Effects of Information on Redistributive Politics.

Many lament that weak accountability and poor governance impede economic development in Africa. Politicians rely on ethnic allegiances that deliver the vote irrespective of performance, dampening electoral incentives. Giving voters information about candidate competence counters ethnic loyalty and strengthens accountability. I extend a canonical electoral model to show how information provision...

Electoral Accountability in Context: How Political Institutions Condition Performance Voting

 The idea that voters use elections to hold governments to account for their performance lies at the heart of democratic theory, and countless studies have shown that economic performance can predict support for incumbents. Importantly, however, recent literature has shown that the link between economic performance and vote electoral outcomes is conditioned by countries " institutional setup ,...

The Twilight of Westminster ? Electoral Reform & its Consequences

The UK political system has long exemplified ‘majoritarian’ or ‘Westminster’ government, a type subsequently exported to many Commonwealth countries. The primary advantage of this system, proponents since Bagehot have argued, lie in its ability to combine accountability with effective governance. Yet under the Blair administration, this system has undergone a series of major constitutional refo...