🔎 Study Focus

This study advances the concept of institutional performance voting: voters respond to the quality of public institutions as a whole, not only to isolated cases of corruption. It addresses a puzzle in the literature that finds limited evidence that voters punish corruption by asking whether broader institutional dysfunction provokes electoral penalties.

📚 Performance audits in Swedish town halls (2003–2014)

• Novel dataset of performance audit reports covering Swedish municipalities from 2003 to 2014.
• Audit reports record official critiques of municipal institutional performance across a range of administrative functions.

🧾 What the evidence shows

• Audit critique is associated with a statistically significant but substantively moderate electoral vote loss of about one percentage point for mayoral parties.
• The same audit critique is associated with a 14 percentage point decrease in the probability that the mayoral party is reelected.

🔬 How the relationship was assessed

• Analysis links municipal performance audit findings to electoral outcomes for mayoral parties across municipalities during 2003–2014, isolating the association between official audit criticism and subsequent vote and reelection outcomes.

💡 Why it matters

• Results suggest voters do respond to institutional quality beyond isolated corruption scandals: audit criticism reduces vote share modestly but markedly lowers reelection chances.
• Findings refine understanding of electoral accountability by highlighting the electoral consequences of institutional performance at the local level.