Electoral Accountability

A common assumption in theories of electoral accountability is that voters learn about an incumbent's quality by observing public goods outcomes. Empirical findings are mixed: making outcomes more visible sometimes strengthens accountability, but often it does not. This work reconciles those heterogeneous findings by centering bureaucrats in the production of public goods. A simple formal model with three actors — a voter, a politician, and a bureaucrat — shows that accountability relationships produce different empirical implications depending on the level of bureaucratic quality.

Why do some executives repress the press while others leave it free? This study tests whether two external constraints — courts that can rule against leaders and citizens who can vote them out — shape executives' decisions to attack media. Using a global panel covering executive-branch attacks on the press from 1949–2016, the authors evaluate whether judicial independence and electoral democracy reduce press attacks and whether these constraints substitute for one another.

The 2014 Mexican Electoral Reform ended an eighty-year ban on reelection for legislators. This study uses a quasi-natural experiment approach to examine how this change affects political behavior.

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.

New research explores how voters punish politicians differently based on political alignment during natural disasters.

Does higher-quality public service lead voters to reward politicians? This question is investigated using signals of municipal school quality in Brazil, a setting particularly favorable to electoral accountability.

New research examines how policymakers' funding sources affect their responsiveness. Using experiments with local elected officials in the U.S., this study finds that revenue source matters significantly for policy accountability.

Voters constrain government policy through electoral accountability, which depends on how electoral systems interact with party structures. Examining 400 parliamentary elections from 1948-2012 shows that strong party bipartality enables effective voter constraint regardless of the system used.

This study investigates how social networks shape political accountability in Mexico.

This study explores how voters' decisions about re-electing representatives are influenced by group identities.