Cyclical accountability
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Cyclical accountability Dieter Stiers1 · Anna Kern2 Received: 10 December 2019 / Accepted: 22 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract A large body of literature has investigated vote and popularity functions, identifying the factors influencing presidential approval ratings or presidential votes. The studies have revealed a strong correlation between the state of the economy and incumbent support. However, so far, less attention has been paid to when voters relate their perceptions of the president’s performance to the real-world economy in a systematic way. While some research focuses on voters’ behavior on Election Day, other studies do not take electoral cycles into account. Hence, while politics often is assumed to follow a “political business cycle”, it is less clear whether voters follow the same logic in holding incumbents accountable for economic conditions. In this article, we offer a systematic study of the timing of accountability mechanisms in the domain of the economy. The analyses show strong patterns of accountability throughout the electoral cycle. Keywords Retrospective voting · Voter myopia · Presidential approval · Economic voting · Electoral accountability · Presidential elections
1 Introduction One of the main principles of democracy is that rulers are subject to citizens’ control and need their approval to stay in power. In most democracies, that principle is operationalized by organizing free and fair elections. Elections function as a mechanism for holding incumbents accountable—i.e., voters can vote incumbents out of office if they are not satisfied with the government’s performance. One precondition for the working of the electoral mechanism is that citizens evaluate governmental performance retrospectively, and reward or punish the incumbent accordingly. That is the main presumption of retrospective voting theory (Key 1966; Fiorina 1981; Manin et al. 1999).
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1112 7-020-00856-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Dieter Stiers [email protected] 1
Centre for Political Science Research, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
2
Department of Political Science, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
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Public Choice
A wide array of studies has investigated the factors influencing presidential popularity or presidential voting—i.e., VP-functions [see the seminal studies of Nannestad and Paldam (1994) and Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier (2013) in this journal]. A “VP-function” can be defined as a relationship explaining support for the government either in terms of votes (“V”) or popularity polls (“P”) (Nannestad and Paldam 1994, pp. 214–215)—and here we focus on the latter. Relating presidential support to objective presidential performance, the relevant studies investigate whether and under what conditions citizens adjust their approval of the incumbent based on performance in office. Th
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