Niels Markwat. In contrast, we find no evidence for the hypothesis that voters base their judgement of who is responsible for budget gridlock on the party affiliation of the governor and act accordingly when casting their ballot. We evaluate the models using a panel data set covering performance and elections from 2001 to 2007 in English local governments where an incumbent … J Elect Public Opin Parties 20(1):55–81, Born A, Van Eck P, Johannesson M (2018) An experimental investigation of election promises. Voters had as many reasons to punish Pelosi as they could think of. First, this study contributes to the knowledge of how policy output matters to voters by identifying three competing aspects of policy output and comparing their relative importance to voter evaluations. Instead, significant portions of voters hesitate between identification with a … The secondary dependent variable question, in which respondents rated the competing party profiles individually, does not force the respondents to make such a choice. Belknap Press of Harvard University, Harvard, Kiewiet DR, Lewis-Beck MS (2011) No man is an island: self-interest, the public interest, and sociotropic voting. The aim of this paper is to study how, and how much, incumbents’ policy output matters to voter evaluations of government performance. Finally, policy congruence with individual preferences was incorporated as the congruence between implemented policy and the respondents’ own preferences. alternation between government and opposition through competitive elections. 2011). First, the chosen design allowed for simultaneous, isolated estimation of the influence of a larger number of evaluation criteria on voters’ evaluations of government performance than a typical survey experiment would have. Corruption in program implementation (based on de Janvry et al. That said, the results should still provide a reliable estimate for the relative importance of the included evaluation criteria for any given voter that is either attached, or not attached to the incumbent party in question. Indeed, it is the choices that the respondents make together, as a sample, that answer the question which performance criteria voters truly find of most importance in evaluating incumbents. Attributing responsibility for the presented performance-related information to the appropriate actor was further simplified by its assignment to individual parties—not government coalitions (see e.g., Fisher and Hobolt 2010; Giuliani and Massari 2019). Rev Econom Stat 60(2):159–173, Fearon J (1999) Electoral accountability and the control of politicians. SSRN Electron J. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3588941, Becher M, Donnelly M (2013) economic performance, individual evaluations, and the vote: investigating the causal mechanism. Instead, their comparison, and the conflicting theoretical expectations that policy outcomes (i.e., the economy) should matter most and that policy output should be most important to voter evaluations, are taken as the guiding focus of the empirical part of this study. For all included attributes here, the theoretical expectation is that more positive outcomes or performance are associated with more positive evaluations of incumbent evaluations; and all attributes can only take on three values. The results of this study expand existing knowledge on what voters believe to constitute good government, and how incumbent political actors may be held accountable for various aspects of their performance in a democracy. Polit Anal 22(1):1–30, Hansen KM, Olsen AL, Bech M (2015) Cross-national yardstick comparisons: a choice experiment on a forgotten voter heuristic. It is important to note that this study does not provide a full model of vote choice; only the retrospective aspect of a vote choice, namely the evaluation of government performance, is studied in this design. 3 In races for Congress and the state legislature, the average incumbent ran for a seat where 45 percent of the constituents lived in territory that was not part of the incumbent’s old district. Annu Rev Polit Sci 3:183–219, Matthieβ T (2020) Retrospective pledge voting: a comparative study of the electoral consequences of government parties’ pledge fulfilment. The same applies to analyses where the unit of analysis was set to party profile, rather than choice task, and where dummy variables were used instead of continuous variables. This decision follows from the deliberate choice to restrict the number of choice tasks per respondent to one. The opposite holds true when the economy is faltering. The AMCE recorded for the policy congruence with individual preferences attribute is more than twice as big as the AMCE for pledge fulfillment; and more than triple the size of the AMCE for policy congruence with majority preferences. The table contains the coefficients of a simultaneous ordinary least squares (OLS) regression including all five attributes as independent variables for both party profiles (A, − 1 to 1; and B, − 1 to 1), and respondents choosing one party profile (‘Party B’, 1) over the other party profile (‘Party A’, 0) as the dependent variable. Democratization 20(6):1117–1143, Hopkins DJ, Pettingill LM (2018) Retrospective voting in big-city US mayoral elections. Of course, voters would also prefer to elect better rather than worse candidates. Bridging that gap is an important aim for this study. While this is arguably not an unreasonable assumption, its accuracy cannot be tested with the available data, and the degree to which the assumption may be false, takes away from the external validity of the findings. Am Polit Res 39(6):1019–1044, Kayser MA, Peress M (2012) Benchmarking across borders: electoral accountability and the necessity of comparison. First, in each election, an incumbent receives a lower vote share the more he supports his party. 7–10). Similarly, it is up to future studies to determine whether the found effects hold up in more realistic settings—using non-fictive scenarios, more concrete information, additional attributes, or perhaps real-world performance evaluations or vote decisions. J Polit 71(4):1225–1237, Franchino F, Zucchini F (2015) Voting in a multi-dimensional space: a conjoint analysis employing valence and ideology attributes of candidates. SN Social Sciences Our results therefore indicate that voters hold members of the majority party collectively accountable for budget gridlock to an extent that leaders of the party often cannot afford to ignore. However, the vast majority of studies on retrospective voting have focused on economic outcomes—aiming, among others, to determine whether voters evaluate short-term or longer term economic development (e.g., Hellwig and Marinova 2015; Wlezien 2015; Jankowski 2018); the global, national, or subnational economy (e.g., Atkeson and Partin 1995; Carsey and Wright 1998; Ragusa and Tarpey 2016; Thorlakson 2016; González-Sirois and Bélanger 2019); which economic indicators voters find most important (e.g., Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000; Bélanger and Lewis-Beck 2004; Van der Eijk et al. The possibility to isolate effects offered by the design of this discrete choice experiment is therefore very important. For policy congruence with individual preferences, this is 16–19% points; for policy congruence with public opinion 4–5% points; and for pledge fulfillment 7–9% points. Of course, in real world voting decisions different modes of incumbent performance are more entangled, performance information is not as readily available to voters, and evaluations are exposed to varying levels of influence of partisan bias; voter awareness; and clarity of attribution, especially in coalition governments. It’s instructive that Trump’s Republican defenders invoked the election of 1876 as a precedent for their efforts to overturn the election of 2020. Int Polit Sci Rev 40(4):486–501, Wlezien C (2015) The myopic voter? Horizontal bars represent 95% confidence intervals; dots without horizontal bars represent the reference category (same attribute value for both parties in choice task). As a potential moderator, the ratings task is placed after the choice task in the experimental design. Yale University Press, New Haven, Fournier P, Blais A, Nadeau R, Gidengil E, Nevitte N (2003) Issue importance and performance voting. Kirkpatrick, who represents Cochise County and part of Pima County, has also signed a resolution to condemn “Republicans’ attempts to overturn the election,” a reference to 147 GOP members of Congress who objected to the certification of electoral votes based on unproven claims of widespread voter … However, when it comes to policy output rather than outcomes, it is possible that voters believe that the policy they personally support will ultimately benefit the rest of society as well.Footnote 10. Harper, New York, Dupont JC, Bytzek E, Steffens MC, Schneider FM (2019) Which kind of political campaign messages do people perceive as election pledges? Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107(29):12804–12809, Healy AJ, Malhotra N (2009) Myopic voters and natural disaster policy. These were the development of the national economy and voters’ personal finances during the incumbents’ tenure in office—pertaining to sociotropic and egotropic economic voter considerations, respectively. Am Polit Sci Rev 103(3):387–406. Running the same analysis with binary logistic regression (logit) produced similar results. The results presented in Table 2 and Fig. The notion that voter evaluations of incumbents’ prior performance underlie incumbents’ chances for re-election puts forth an important question: based on which criteria do voters evaluate incumbents? An analysis of the short- and long-term electoral returns to beneficial policy. Annu Rev Polit Sci 16:285–306, Healy AJ, Persson M, Snowberg E (2017) Digging into the pocketbook: evidence on economic voting from income registry data matched to a voter survey. Westview Press, Boulder, Knudsen E, Johannesson MP (2019) Beyond the limits of survey experiments: how conjoint designs advance causal inference in political communication research. University of California Press, Berkeley, Ragusa JM, Tarpey M (2016) The geographies of economic voting in presidential and congressional elections. This suggests that voters allocate limited discretionary freedom to incumbents to obtain desirable outcomes by any means necessary (see e.g., Fox and Shotts 2009). The main results of the experiment are presented in Table 2. Princeton University Press, Princeton, Anderson CJ (2007) The end of economic voting? Still, no assumptions are made about the perceived equidistance of these values per and across attributes—and arguably such assumptions are unnecessary when the hypothesized direction of the effect is clear (see Hainmueller et al. In essence the mirror image of the popular notion in studies on economic voting that voters are sociotropic in economic evaluations because they believe economic gains for society will eventually benefit their personal finances (e.g., Kiewiet and Lewis-Beck 2011). What incumbents (do not) do, arguably reflects more directly on their performance than the outcomes that may be attributed to their actions. Applied to evaluation criteria of incumbent performance, if voters allot their incumbents a limited degree of discretionary freedom, the incumbents’ actions—i.e., policy output—should be the primary performance criterion. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423920000384, Performance information and learning effects on citizen satisfaction with public services, https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2020.1775281, Can Citizens Set City Policy? The coefficients were obtained from an OLS regression analysis with dummy variables for these categories—excluding all reference categories—and party choice (party B = 1; party A = 0) as the dependent variable. Overall, the findings support the notion that policy output matters to voters even beyond outcomes. Thus, the scientific contribution of this study is twofold. The important distinction, however, is that individual voters were found to care considerably more about the implemented policy corresponding to their own preferences, than to majority preferences or election pledges. These five criteria are policy congruence with majority preferences (i); individual preferences (ii); election pledge fulfillment (iii); development of the national economy (iv); and development of personal finances (v). ):340–355: //doi.org/10.1117/S0003055409990104, Healy AJ, Malhotra N ( 2014 ) Holding governments accountable elections... 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