A long-standing puzzle in democratic accountability is whether voters punish and reward incumbents only for policy outcomes or also for the intentions behind those actions. Incumbents often act intending to produce beneficial outcomes, yet imperfect control can lead good intentions to produce bad results. The outcome–intention hypothesis predicts that voters reward incumbents for both good outcomes and good intentions.
This study asks how political parties divide attention across the past, present and future in campaign communication and whether incumbency shapes emotive rhetoric across these temporal dimensions. Using supervised machine learning to label temporal focus, the author analyzes 621 party manifestos from nine countries spanning 1949–2017 and describes the share of manifesto text devoted to each temporal category. The contribution is a systematic, cross-national description of parties' temporal rhetorical emphasis and how statements about past and present relate to differences in sentiment between incumbents and opposition.
This research asks whether moving local production abroad (offshoring) affects electoral outcomes for incumbent government parties. Using a difference-in-differences approach and an original Spanish survey, the author studies municipalities where a local plant relocated production abroad and compares electoral outcomes to municipalities without such events. The paper's central contribution is evidence that voters punish incumbent government parties in places that experienced offshoring, with larger vote declines where more jobs were lost and distinct patterns in coalition governments.
Which factors influence how voters evaluate policy responses to economic shocks from natural disasters? This paper uses an original survey experiment among American citizens to test three fairness-based explanations—affectedness, need, and political ties—and compares those stated preferences to observed disaster-relief allocations from 1993–2008. The central contribution is a combined experimental and observational assessment that links mass preferences over distributional fairness to actual allocation patterns, while preserving the authors’ qualifications.
New research explores how voters punish politicians differently based on political alignment during natural disasters.
This paper investigates whether presidents are held accountable for economic conditions during their term, examining how approval judgments evolve over time. Using opinion polls covering hundreds of presidencies, the analysis finds that while the economy significantly influences voter evaluations in a president's first year, its impact grows stronger by the second year and disappears entirely after that. Similar results emerge from studies on governor approval rates and state economic conditions. Furthermore, an original survey experiment designed to control for varying gubernatorial tenures following the 2018 elections confirms these patterns across different contexts. These findings prompt important questions about voter competence in retrospective voting or potentially highlight leaders' incentives – spreading effort over later years might be one such strategy.
This article examines whether democratic accountability worsens racial inequalities by analyzing retrospective voting patterns. Focusing on local elections, it explores how voters evaluate government performance based on student outcomes.
This study replicates and extends earlier work examining how natural disasters influence retrospective voting in gubernatorial elections. It demonstrates that leaders face heightened scrutiny during crises, with both challenges and opportunities for demonstrating competence.
Climate policy enjoys broad national approval but faces concentrated local opposition. This study investigates spatial voting patterns near renewable energy projects.
Do natural disasters help or hurt incumbents at the ballot box? Prior work offers conflicting answers: Achen and Bartels (2002, 2016) argue that voters punish incumbents indiscriminately after disasters, while other studies find voters reward or punish officials according to the quality of relief efforts. The literature’s focus on contemporary cases may shape these divergent conclusions.