From Democratic Accountability to Consumer Choice

• In Event: Economic Policy Preferences

Abstract

Electoral accountability is a fundamental feature of representative democracy which functions to align politicians and voters’ policy preferences. To maintain accountability, voters are expected to reward or punish incumbents based on their capacity to deliver policy outcomes that are in line with public expectations. Models of economic voting thereby assume that voters indeed expect politicians to influence economic and distributive outcomes. But does this expectation continue to be plausible once governments cede control to market actors? Over the past few decades, governments across all rich, postindustrial democracies have restructured their relationship with the market through deregulation and privatization reforms. These reforms have proved quite resilient to change even in cases in which they have failed to deliver satisfactory outcomes, as policy reversals remain exceedingly rare. And yet, we know too little on how the expansion of markets at the expense of the government has impacted one of the central tenants of democratic systems, electoral accountability.

In this paper, I suggest that the staying power of privatization and deregulation reforms is partially due to these reforms framing effects. By submerging the state, policy outcomes become synonymized primarily with the behavior of market actors. Voters, on their part, become less likely to attribute economic outcomes to government policies. To test the effect of market reform on electoral accountability, I leverage an original survey experiment of 1,516 adult Americans which asked respondents to assess incumbent performance in light of a service area of declining quality. My results indicate that privatization can increase voter satisfaction and improve the relative performance of incumbent politicians given unsatisfactory economic outcomes. This effect did not materialize with respect to deregulation reforms, which provide a less visible signal to voters. Taken together, my findings suggest that privatization can curb electoral accountability by making certain policy domains less susceptible to public demand, and consequently, risks creating areas of democratic deficit.

Author

• Itay Machtei, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill