A Democratic Dilemma? When Voters Rationally Forgo Accountability

• In Event: Electoral Accountability

Abstract

Why does electoral accountability breakdown? Existing research argues that failures of accountability in democracies come from poor informational environments, voters' cognitive and emotional biases, weak institutions, or partisan tribalism. In contrast, this paper argues that none of these shortcomings is necessary for accountability to breakdown. Rather, we show that well-informed, intelligent voters may still rationally forgo accountability in advanced democracies due to two features of elections. First, while representation is multidimensional, voters only have one vote to jointly satisfy many desirable goals. Second, because electoral choice is limited, voters may face difficult trade-offs when they go to the polls. Using original survey and conjoint experimental evidence from three countries (United Kingdom, United States, Spain, N = 4200) and qualitative analysis of voters’ thinking in their own words, we show that most voters are not rationalizers. Instead, they correctly attribute responsibility for bad outcomes to poorly performing incumbents, even if the candidate comes from their own party. However, many still decide to vote for poor performers after carefully weighting other important factors such as issue agreement, ideological congruence and partisan trust. Overall, this paper uncovers three important findings. First, ideological moderates and independents are more likely to punish poorly performing incumbents and use their vote to fulfill electoral accountability than ideologically committed voters and partisans. Second, contrary to conventional wisdom, even partisan voters attribute significant positive value to policy congruence and performance considerations, i.e. they are not blind partisans. Third, electorates as a whole are capable of fulfilling electoral accountability, even if a substantial portion of the electorate is very partisan.

Author

• Ana Mafalda Pratas Fernandes, Harvard University